Phoenix Ark's Blog

Dear jolly innocent reader,

to really welcome you into the family at Harry-N-Sally Abrams Ink, New Amsterdam, celebrate with a free Macdonald’s Happy Meal, and have a company Tea party, at our loving children’s wing, Am-u-More-or-less, we want to blog on and on about some of our very favourite authors. Just to let you know too, ‘the kids are all right’, which they probably aren’t, or not the adult ones, down on the farm.

The delightful Laura Dora Miracle has been writing clever text messages again, she never staaaarps, and making us pots of Gold, so it really is a miracle, or myracle, if a little addictive (like heroin, Lydia Lunch, and sap, sad lawyers.) She’s great fun for a night on the town, and a true life priority. Michelmas Shiny-Buckle has been writing about his sisters too, grimmly and rather badly, who also happen to be his editors, which also makes us bucket loads, so God’s holy miracles abound. Hope is the end of a rainbow, let’s face it, and a smiling Leprechaun of language. That’s Irish, not the IRA, which we used to fund over here in the Dawn-Broke-on-the-Nothing-New-World, as part of our special relationships retirement and pension plan. (Don’t you have any shares in connected humanity?!) We have had another Book of Wonder just in too, or out, Peter the Great’s Nimble Eyes of Truest Love and Courage, and the tills are ka-chinging, the Covers aglowing, the Margehritas aflowin’, and joys ajumpin’, in the In-Cold-Blood, high wheat plains of truth, art, literature and David Rosen (who?). Alleluia, and God bless serious reading in America, and serious editing too!

Of course, we all bow a deep knee to the author of The Endless Saga of a Bad Whimpy Bun, which is also a film and fast food burger chain in the wicked UK, that Macdonalds wiped out, just like those creepy and uncivilised rainforests. That’s a very odd place too, unlike the sign at Katz’s, with Queens and Kings and things, we simply don’t understand, for being far too Ye Oldee Worldee, reciting poetry, and, well, somewhere ‘out there’, like Mogadishu. None of us have passports either, and never liked ourselves there anyhow, especially when we said we did, with the moist tincture of truth and love in our eyes, not even in Morrisey’s Ye Oldee Sloane Square restaurant. Oooooh, yes, yes, yes. Besides, a waiter was accidentally rude to the owner, so he closed the whole place down, like CBGB’s on the Bowery, truth, or a former publisher here. (That’s true).

We would write more about William Sleator, but he was real, talented, an alcoholic and probably had an affair with a Smurf, and if we let any grown-up reality into our blogs, or lives, we might have to reveal that we are all flawed human beings, even Stuart, Toberlerone and Fang. That Jasper Wells-Fargo has a private life, Brad Betterman rocks, Tamara Braces has big American teeth, far bigger and nastier now in smiling Denmark, and her greatest worshipper Susanna Van-York-Winkle was once good, literally, but spent too long in Sleepy Hollow, dreaming of the Dutch, and being far too tough, ruthless and ambitious for anyone’s good. Good on ya, girl. Harold Reeve’s-Tale is nicer than any of us, but the tale is done, like poor Geof Chaucer, whoever that bad British dude was, before the Oldee Brits were invented, while our boss really is the headless horseman!

We can’t say any of this, because we want to keep our jobs, we’d almost kill for those, certainly knife in the back in this climate, are all reeespectful and politically correct Americans, under the thumb of our internal military machine complex, and having a happy company Tea Party too, just for you, kids. But in the US of A, or certainly New Yorkie bar, half of us really do live in an extended episode of Prison Break. Which we all like to watch, tattooed and trembling over mom’s ever vengeful cupcakes, instead of paying attention at our own serious Book Club meets, to our one unread biography of Chairman Mao, (he liked the ladies, sweet man, and the cover’s kitsch), or the deeper cause of humanity and intelligence (not the CIA kind). Sail on, Ulysses, because hope’s not an anchor at all! Besides, we all carry side-arms, live on the Boulevard of Other Author’s Broken Dreams, under looming film posters of blokes who are rough with girls (it’s art), and carefully sought prints of Volcanoes, until we so ‘changed’ and moved to our own Upper Flip-Side, and might have to shoot you for being emotionally illiterate, reading other author’s text messages, not accepting the wished for war and peace we never made, or trying to tell the unbelievable truth, in the unbelievable Cyberverse. Norman Swarzkhopf was cleverer, in never humiliating the enemy you slept with, but it always was a war out there, just be peaceful about it!

There is one sad, bad, mad author we will never blog about, our most brilliant and creative, (yeah – right), although we don’t believe he ever had any, yeah rights, to any, yeah rights, kind of privacy or dignity either, let alone contracted support, unlike us guys: the celebrated branded animal author, bad lover and mass murderer, Davidov Clementi-Dowsing (DCD), because he is from the U of K, just an unforgiveable asshole, (mom and Brad said so – Janet), and only reminds us of Sirius Black, or Prison Break’s T-bag, at our happy, right-wing and quite insane, ‘side’-based American Book Club Tea Party. God help the free world, he didn’t help us to help free speech!

Actually we pretend to be Democrats, and very human and healing indeed, it sells so well nowadays, like ice-creams at a hole in the stone-wall, down in The Village, dreaming of Stardust kinda girls, but not at the back of 80’s bar-rooms, ‘Gee, Officer Krupky’. But over here love is an ugly, embarrassing word, like healing, and Democrat and Republican mean exactly the same thing in the Anti-Social Universe, which spreads and is ‘screw you, buddy, life’s unfair, owe ya nothing, grow up, shut up, and let’s shoot another polar bear book too, then grab all the oil ‘. God Bless Sarah Palin. (No, don’t, though she has good legs.)

It is a miracle ‘Dave’s’ still alive and kicking, twitching and whimpering really, like the way the Universe really ends, although we systematically destroyed his whole career too, never mind your fave characters, fans, that did not earn us enough, but then at the Adams Family, where he ‘liked’ to burn his britches, not to mention drop them, miracles never cease, God and humanity willing. Next week we hope to blog on and on and on about bitterness, human rights, belief, love, ‘literaturity’ in US text messaging, (Jeeeeese!) powerlessness, invasion by the Dark Lord, she who must not be named, seeing, sniffing out mendacity and nasty politics, not being outrageous on Mother’s Day or by phoning you at a restaurant, and why Morticia-Braces-Abrams is now the favourite company daughter, not gone from our good earth like poor, human, rock-n-roll Amy Winehouse, or responsible for anything real, ever. But always had a secret fear of, yet passion for, The Thing. ‘Probably runs in the family, Uncle Festor’. Hot weather and happy days ahead, as always, but watch those frightened boxes, we no longer live in, all together, side by side by Sondheim, and smile, we’re all on Candid camera! (Until we get fired, fire you first, even if you are contracted and ain’t any employee with any rights at all, then move to Chicago to do an odd remake of The Untouchables.)

The Mexican Mendoza-Line Doorboy

This is a spoof, so sue me, nah-nah-nah, although you already took everything worth having anyhow, except a sense of humOR. (Give it a rest – ed, you promised, you big liar!).

Reading notes for the Illegal department, lost in translation by Inhuman Resources, and Trish Kalculator: This is a work of fast fiction and has no relation or resemblance to food, nobody’s businessess, persons, living or killed off, Rights, Privacy, Abrams, love, loyalty, Lauren Myracle, Abrahams Lincoln, Thomas JaffaCakeSon, Friendship, Consensual Professional Relationships, Michael Buckley’s Sisters Grimm’s Editors, Belief, Humanity, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Racehorse’s You Stop Backing, Contracts, Honesty, Hew, Screw and Glue (Wot’s that, we side-lined it too, like all your books and friends?!), Justice and the American Way, The Smurf’s Bluer Period, Emotional Torture, Cowardice, Meaning, Peter Nimble and his Fantastic Eyes, Joe ‘All the Talents’ Regal, Endangered Species, (like publishing, real authors, or even Polar Bears,) or anything that really happened, ever, even in a Painted Desert, the House of Breezes, not Braces, Evil Vanbrooo Court, Brandon Noonan’s psyche, or at The Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, that did not stay there! Certainly not everything that came after. Impossible! A judge would not believe it anyway, and nobody else can, or frankly even cares. So kiss me, ya fool, but never, ever trust me.

“The people who are trying to make this world worse, are not taking a day off, why should I? Light up the darkness.” Bob Marley, two days after he was shot and walked out on stage.

You think you might achieve something by telling some home truths, honestly, or with a bit of heart! Like the blisteringly brilliant act of religious and poetic melancholy and disillusionment, in Terence Davies’ film on Liverpool, ‘Of Time and the City’. Though I didn’t rate his reading of Ozymandius. Well, perhaps you can’t achieve anything, because, as for the last all revelatory and metaphysical blog, the hits have crashed through the floor. No one wants to hear it. There we are, I’ve tried and give a dog his due.

I’ve realised for some time though that most of the people reading this blog aren’t an amazed, indignant, admiring or fascinated ‘public’, but mostly people I know, or knew. The Phoenix Ark community! Not that most communicate in any decent human way, nowadays. I was with a friend recently I caught admitting he’d read it, when he first pretended he hadn’t. If thats the case, it’s not some grand or once heroic writing act at all, some great act of human courage, or trumpeted awareness, but like some whispered spectator sport, and just an extension of the little tragedy that happened too long ago, among lovers, colleagues, or so called friends, perhaps in modern publishing too. ‘Have you heard, on no, it couldn’t be, he didn’t, they did, they would, but yes, how very awful…’

As one commentator had it on the documentary ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’, the reality is people are pouring out their hearts and souls on blogs, or twittering, to be ‘consumed’ by and lost on media platforms, ‘interested’ only in the turnover and throughput, and ‘meaning’ nothing much at all. Not truly connecting up, or piercing to the heart or soul. White noise, in the sad and often nasty Cyberverse, and perhaps the mark of our true disconnection, and growing loneliness too. Like Borges’ Ficiones, perhaps it’ll all weave together one day, into some giant mystery of misdirected humanity and produce just one word, STOP, instead of billions.

I’d rather be ‘allowed‘ to write good and well published books again, stories, communicate through them, in fiction or fact, and have my own private life back too. Er, be a paid, thoughtful and private author. It was just unfortunate I have my kind of temperament, found this way ahead, despaired of the politics of publishing, didn’t raise the money to make this a real little publisher, and that a true story got so strange and so big, it felt like having heaven on your head, and hell underneath too. That somehow I was meant to write and communicate, even unpaid, so actually need to scribble or tap, tap, tap away. Awful business, sometimes, writing. Get a job.

When one former friend and writer warned me about it, he said ‘they’ have to think its fun and easy, so they will buy you, or buy into you. Who really is ‘they’ in the world, is it you? It doesn’t speak much real respect for art or writing, or the reader either. He compared my tappings to Jack Kerouak, but didn’t know that I lost a heart in Greenwich Village, to a girl with a terror of many things, before my own misdirected strength so helped her ‘change’, and in an age more attuned to ‘Sex in the City’ coach tours, than bloody poets. Or that the Epigraph in unread Fell is from Kerouac, ‘Burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles!’ Fat chance. You could write an old fashioned Roman A Clee, of course, except the whole amazement of this story, to naive me, anyhow, and partly about fiction, is surely that it is perfectly true. Things like that are just not supposed to happen, even in fiction, or real life either! But the bottom line is I should have sued my American publisher and won in the only really meaningful terms today, money, then slammed the door hard. Then you might say ‘he was right!’, even if I’ve been completely wrong. (Which I have, but don’t you get things wrong too?)

We all complain of ‘the machine’ though, safe behind the scenes, raise shocked eyebrows at the horror or inhumanity of the Press, attacking or destroying the individual, and still consume it in secret, but who really stands up? Who would even really want to? I’d never advise young people to really trust ‘Social Networking’, because it can become like the vicious rumour mill in the playground. Watch your backs, and be careful of the ‘evil eye’! We throw images up of how many friends we have, where we’ve been on hols, how deep our tans are, or why we’re great and you aren’t, then wonder what on earth we’re looking at in the weird human mirror.

I would advise real ‘adults’ to try and tell some kind of truth to one another, good and bad, and at the right time too, when they are actual mirrors to each other, because it’s always what’s hidden that does the real harm. Like the William Blake poem ‘I was angry with my friend, I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe, I told it not my wrath did grow…‘ But real adults are often not half as nice as children, in the songs of innocence or experience, and not half as ‘grown up’ either.

It’s a little tragedy to talk here of someone you really loved, joined to the destruction of a writing career, and a publisher’s career in New York too. Of the shere and unecessary cruelty of that two year situation, a bit like the priest in Golding’s Rites of Passage, who turns his face to the wall and dies of shame. I went beyond even shame, the mark of real failure, but for some reason am not quite dead yet. Maybe I am still proud of being a writer and still expect a hearing. But blah, it’s all right to fail, if you come back, or find another ‘country’ to grow in, and nowadays we see so much harm chanelled down the tubes, so much violence or ‘injustice’, only our own fears and lives matter, and we tut, tut, tut away, with false pity, or amused contempt, praying it won’t touch us. Although it’s a let-it-all-hang-out world, that’s not exactly the better image I have of friends, of Robby Ross tipping his hat to Oscar Wilde at his trial and disgrace, and not very grand or big souled. But nowadays we don’t especially believe in disgrace either, and now it’s ‘either this Desktop wallpaper will have to go, or I will!’

The real awfulness though is a little bit of emotional courage and responsibility from you know who, as partner, ally or claimed ‘friend’, really turning to the person in the frame that mattered, when it mattered, and not allowing herself to always go behind backs, and no one would have been so harmed, because several were, or ‘Hew, Screwed and Glued’ professionally either. I know for a fact that author ruined his own life, and lost the woman he loved too, by being so eternally spineless and opportunistic. ‘HELP ME’ he raged at me once, and in serious moments I always tried, but I’ve been saying it ever since, wrongly too, because others like to leave what they can’t cope with on different doorsteps, and forget their own vulnerablity or mistakes. It really gets inside, sometimes. I’d rather real and openly expressed hate, perhaps, a true and decent fight, not pretending everything is all right, because the world’s awful, unfair or just ‘like that’, but nowadays I feel rather sorry for lots of people.

So dear friends, dear brave readers, noble men and women, kinder and more talented children, who will get it righter, seeing others errors, rue the day the big bad ever happens to you, the perfect storm, or someone finds you out, if they think they have, or you do! In Loot Joe Orton says ‘never get caught’. Not a very inspiring message for mankind, really, but probably true and the spirit is electric, it must move and change, so sing the electric blood. I did love being published by Abrams, performing, touring, speaking to kids or adults, but I also found it quite hard, any public voice beyond stories, and, like all younger people, always found real invasion awful. As awful as an ex, which was another real cause of all this, in the inequalities of what an editor and an author really are. An editor is perfectly allowed to do that in a relationship, big deal, but not quite so allowed to do it to the writer, surely? But we allow ourselves any easy rationalisations we like. So I became Prufrock, wriggling on a pin, the madman ‘shaking a dead Geranium’, or more like the model in Becket’s play, Catastrophe. A sculptured agony.

It was the cause of the most phenomenal invasion, still echoing here, and total disillusionment too. It was impossible to actually shut up about it, in those circumstances, or just a bit too hard this time, because life and the word were too close. But ‘truth‘, with its six degrees of seperation and even stranger connections, its pebble in the pond ripples, is harder than all this, and nobody can handle it very well. The spirit is also like some kind of jar too, that empties and fills up again. Like tears whelling up from the deep, watching a distant, burning sunset, spilling out and leaving you hopefully clearer, but cleaner too. Come along, have a laugh and get on.

As for this sign-of-the-times form of ‘communication’, which art or ‘culture’ have to try and incorprate too, in the potentially awful solipsisms of modern internet culture, do you really like blogs and blogging at all? I don’t, and never read others, but don’t sweat it too much. The net is not like splashing something across a front page at all, certainly here, it’s a very small circle usually, even like that old saw of the writer’s art – just talking to a friend honestly – and blogs have very particular readerships. Perhaps you should all come to lunch, instead, or arrange a Blogger’s holiday together! Wouldn’t that be wacky? But I’m not a writer with a wide audience any more, so, let’s hear it for the common man and woman, just trying to be, live and even be happy, who would not dream of getting within 3000 miles of a bloody blog, and add one for the Poet’s Sweatshop too, on the glories of privacy and anonimity, my editor-ex’s anonimity, as opposed to that supposed ‘last infirmity of noble minds’, fame. On blogging as well, or sort of…

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us – don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring blog!

(For blog read bog! Those were the days, my friend.)

Emily Dickinson

There you go, what more wonderful story for an animal writer than the BBC’s new series on Black Bears, with Chris Buchanan. The Canadian researchers were wonderful, when the little bear cub Hope got seperated from its mother Lilly. They thought a wolf or cayote had taken it, and were as distressed as if it had been any human being, perhaps more so. We’re animals too. Then came the moment they found Hope up a tree, coaxed it down with milk ‘on a stick’, and it nearly bit the researcher’s hand off. Put in a cat box, little Hope was hissing in fear and anger, with raw, wild fury and emotion. Hope escaped and the reasearcher had to lead Lilly back to her cub, wondering if she would accept it again, after so many days. The reunion, the sudden recognition, the crying bonding, the raw tenderness, would bring tears to the hardest eyes. Gives you Hope!

So here’s the end sequence to a novel badly unread somewhere. Yet how absurd to make an editor a muse. They wanted to control and edit, to compete and to win. To write the story they think is culture:

“Death,” whispered Tarlar, “you do not fear it, Fell, by water or any other way?”
“What is there to fear?” answered the Black Wolf, “if it is an end, then so be it. For there is no pain in that, except the pain left to the living. I once thought, and felt with The Sight, that I could see the pain of the whole word, and it grew and grew like the sea. But though all feel pain, it does not join together like individual droplets in a pool. A million deaths is really only one death. And if death is not an end, then what more wonderful journey. If we do not fear it? We must have the courage to face the truth, and the future.”
“Come, Fell,” said Tarlar, “we’ll run happy and free through the world, togther, until we two must walk the Wolf Trail in our turn. For that is as it must be.”
“Wait, Tarlar, there’s something I must do first.”
“Do?”
Fell had stepped away again and raised his muzzle.
“I must howl, Tarlar. For I must ask forgiveness too. Only they can let me go, I think.”
Fell’s sleek, black muzzle lifted and his cry rose in the air. Aaaaoo. It sang in the night, weaving a mysterious wildness over the revellers below, as if casting a wild spell to protect them from any harm. But Fell was not talking to them alone.
“For you,” cried the black wolf’s howl, “For all who are lost, or alone, or frightened in the world. For we are all lost, and all frightened. For any in pain too, or in sorrow, and for any who can no longer tell the light from the darkness, the sadness from the joy. I must leave you now, for I’ve found my way, for a time at least, and I wish you well.”
The howl went on in the night, like a wonderful song, yet both more and less than a song, and as it did it seemed to the black wolf as if the world was changing. As if the things he saw about him, the trees and the forest and the palace, he no longer had words for at all, and so he no longer knew what they were.
“But I let you know that I too have seen what you have seen, suffered what you have suffered. For all things walk the same way. But now, for the last times, I, Fell of The Mountaintops, give you my blessing. So listen well, for love’s greatest art is to listen.”

FELL

Hmmm, perhaps we need the story and words of The Zen Master, ‘We’ll see!”

A young Jack Nicholson was bristling and joyful last night, and always with his touch of the wolf, in the film of the Ken Kesey novel we have not read here- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. All the issues of male freedom and anger, and the possible threat of the feminine too, were on show in a story all about the wounding of the mind, and the freedom of the spirit. The Nurse Ratchett horror of too much social ‘normality‘, or just about disappearing through the cracks. But of course it is about an age that believed in lobotomising ‘enemies of society’, or the hurt or disfunctional. When one of the sanest characters of them all, The Chief, smothers Nicholson with a pillow, now his hero’s mind and spirit have been destroyed, then tears out the sink to smash it through the window and escape into nature, it’s one of the most moving moments in all film. It was only the second to win all five major academy awards, repeated in a film that should not have – The Silence of The Lambs. Can you hear them screaming, Clasrisssse?!

You know, it’s ok for a writer to go from the heights to the depths and back again. It is the territory of art, as long as it’s turned to art. But what DE PROFUNDIS human pain do we really understand nowadays? Power is often ripe with hypocrisy, and while, in our hyper rational and, because of it perhaps far more ruthless Universe, we speak of the ‘right thing’, when do we speak of the whole thing, or the place of the soul? Not an eternal soul, for me, but the eternal repetition of energies and great or sad stories. The myths we don’t value or understand anymore.

We see so much horror, so much the mass struggle, we have abandoned the language of true tragedy too, which is the reaching individual’s, and so true understanding and compassion. To me an American publisher’s treatment, in those circumstances, voided any real understanding of the value and the purpose of people and of art completely. But all my books too have talked of animal nature and instincts, and the problem of free will. Not everything in life is a choice at all, not about ‘rights’ alone, indeed if you watch The Code, we are all driven by factors that if you reduce everything to the mere ‘should’, or the fake propriety, is a complete insult to the soul and spirit, temporal or religious, in our supposedly Christian or forgiving culture. An insult to love and meaning itself, not to mention an insult to art. DCD

Despite our slightly right wing blog on water cannons, perhaps it’s time to speak up for the young. Cameron has called parts of our society ‘sick’. Yes, but which parts? The Daily Mail is sounding off about ‘respectable’ and ‘decent’ people and slamming the thugs, sometimes quite rightly, but as Judges begin to use words like scum, how quickly are we going to forget what has been exposed so recently about the scandals right across the Media, and in the Police? About MPs fixing their expenses, or about the hugely dubious behaviour of many bankers. Where does the moral rot start and stop? If respect is at a minimum, perhaps there is little wonder, and perhaps we need to respect what it is to be young again and to need to hope. How difficult and frightening it can be at times, how easy it is to be led by peer pressure, and how lost you can become. We talk rightly about parenting, but what hope is there if that generation has not been parented, and we also forget that we all go through profoundly different stages of development as human beings. The language of another generation is often not even heard in developing brains, no matter how much you splash it across Newspapers. The failure of literacy is partly cultural, but also an educational scandal and a tragedy for them, and now us. If ‘society’ wants to and really can parent its young, beyond the family unit, and not just threaten, though it’s tough love we should be talking now, the last thing we want to do is stigmatise certain groups, and it is always with the young that the future lies, in a world dominated by intstant reward and short termism. So add some compassion and understanding to the action, and also remember that in being too draconian you threaten to harden and criminalise another generation.

Ok, we had a comment from the delightfully named ‘We are the Flowers in your Dustbin’ blog proving they did loot Waterstones after all! Check out the smashed window, but closed shutters, then the marvellous love of Dr Zeus and Dostoyevsky. Notice the deliberate mistakes. No doubt after they have all been revealed by Columbo, and done reading time, (with true compassion), there will be redemption through the love of a good and true woman, and literary editor! No, forget that last bit, it’s tedious and childish.

We have looted the photo and will remove it if so asked, because we could not afford the court case, but you can check it out at http://wearetheflowersinyourdustbin.wordpress.com/2011/08/11/london-looters-raid-waterstones/