Phoenix Ark's Blog

The Flaming Lips Do You Realize? Lyrics:

One, two, three, four –
Do You Realize – that you have the most beautiful face
Do You Realize – we’re floating in space –
Do You Realize – that happiness makes you cry
Do You Realize – that everyone you know someday will die

And instead of saying all of your goodbyes – let them know
You realize that life goes fast
It’s hard to make the good things last
You realize the sun don’-go down
It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round

Do You Realize – Oh – Oh – Oh
Do You Realize – that everyone you know
Someday will die –

And instead of saying all of your goodbyes – let them know
You realize that life goes fast
It’s hard to make the good things last
You realize the sun don’-go down
It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round

Do You Realize – that you have the most beautiful face
Do You Realize

Copyright – The Flaming Lips

A long time ago someone I was close to started talking about compassion. They later apologised for their behaviour personally in, I guess, a ‘battle of the sexes’. It made me so angry though when someone both close to my heart and to my work, much younger than me, then suddenly started using that very same word, as if they had just discovered it, and they had done nothing wrong at all. As much as the words, or their own great life revelation on their behalf is that ‘life is unfair’! Tell me about it, but perhaps we should try a little harder. If I had been less vulnerable, perhaps I should have seen that we only understand what we can understand at the time, and all have our own roads, and ways of growing. Yet it suggested not compassion, but some kind of ghastly superiority, as they made me the most revolting person who ever lived. I should have been bigger than that. I think my novels are compassionate, and I think I have tried to be compassionate too, through a great deal of feeling and thought, and I have sometimes got it wrong.

But maybe we can all find a deeper and realer compassion for others and for ourselves. The sufferings around the world can be far worse than anything I’ve gone through. When I was in Rome I read and started blogging about Krishnamurti’s ‘Freedom from the Known’. If grief is fear and the draw of the past, then acknowledge it and stand in your own fear and ask why. When I was so alone, almost had everything meaningful a human being can stripped away, there were awful moments of fear, but also a sense of enormous light beyond all that, always there, always just around the corner. There still is, but it takes peace and forgiveness to see it, and to let it bloom inside you. Really it is the joy and especially real creativity that adults can lose.

I don’t like the gloopily religious, though I am interested in ideas of ‘God’ and faith, as much as rational and very irrational science, but I did find huge meaning in another quote used in Scream of the White Bear, from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, from a book on stories throughout literature called The Seven Basic Plots – “Recognize the boundless light that is your true self and you will be saved.” Saved from what? Not to me some revolting idea of a vengeful after life, but from the loneliness and the dark that can make a hell for the individual, in the here and now, and reflect the hells we sometimes see all around us in the ‘real’ world. An ex also called me ‘mad’ and ‘deluded’ and it made me touch real madness, which is only disconnection from the flow inside and out, because if you see a wound, surely you don’t pour salt in it, or kick a person when they are down. In my jokey way I blogged a long time ago that I was the guy ‘Who Mistook his Wife for a Publisher’. It was a reference to that very compassionate American psychologist, Oliver Sachs, who says so many fascinating things about art, the brain and consciousness.

A book I was strangely influenced by as a young man, apart from Steppenwolf(!), was John Fowles’s The Magus. He later backed away from an enormous best seller and seemed rather to disown it, for other novels like The French Lieutenant’s Woman. He also said something like ‘I don’t know all about this God thing, but I know Hell exists.’ Somewhere you can see exactly why, in the Magus, and in the question mark about the modern, liberated woman, in the two possible endings of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the dark and the light. A writer’s danger is that they are one the inside, and the outside, if they are any good, and they write about experience as they perceive it, and it can catch them in their own lives. I know what my hell was, it was vacillation in that fundamental ‘fight or flight’ mechanism, and then losing true respect for the feminine and a connection with it, but if it is outside in the people we love, it is also inside Men too. Phoenix Ark really was started to try and find some connection in a world that can be very tough and frightening and with artists and writers supporting each other, and it will try to go on doing that. It was enormously important to me when I reached through all the politics of business and publishing, of agents and deals and publicity, and readers wrote to say how my books had touched them, because it restored belief in my own value as an author. Try and forget the self regarding man, and I’ll get back to storytelling, if the modern publishing world allows me to.

DCD July 2011

Erratum, getting a bit sloppy and overworked

What am I so bloody angry about, that I so screwed up, that people can be so bloody superficial, or that Abrams, a very good publisher, could start behaving like the State Department with it own contracted author? It’s a publisher, supposedly the defender of culture and freedom, of art and artists too, of the human, not the Pentagon.

Isn’t it absurd that Orwell’s deep warning in 1984, with Big Brother and the spectre of room 101, the worst that a person can face, in an authority knowing their very worst fear, turned into the 15 minutes of fame media-fest of Endemol’s Big Brother. The media horror became truly gross when they did what they did to Jade Goody, following her dying of Cancer. As the writer said on The Night Watch last night, ‘we think goodness and honour is the human, but savagery can be part of it too’, or to that effect. Some people can cope, other people would rather die, there is no absolute about what you can deal with, or rather adults can deal with, but not everyone is the same at all. The thing that children must be protected from, especially on the Internet, is what they are not emotionally equipped to deal with or judge, though children will find many ways to get around prespcriptions to find out about ‘the adult world’. The founder here, perhaps part adult, part child, had his Room 101, but what’s yours?

For writers this is a very big Cautionary Tale, but what I’d like Abrams and an ex agent to wonder is, ‘oh my God, how could we do that to any individual, in the end?’ They won’t. ‘A Man he hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.’ But make people the villain and perhaps they start turning into a bit of a villain. No one likes the confessional, or the martyr, though they say the confession is sometimes the moment of healing, while perhaps I had to speak up in front of my own stories and fans.

ps Erratum for originally saying Huxley, but perhaps that ending is more precient than we know. Brave New World and 1984 are perhaps two books easy to conflate but its interesting that a classic like Brave New World was at 329 on Amazon today, after all those years!

David just sent us this from Rome, with actually a warning about things like therapy, at specific times, anyway, because the crisis can be precisely talking and not acting. Who wants navel gazing, in the face of life?! But having actually been branded evil, it is about what Goethe has to say about the devil. Or in fact that very spare ‘Jungian’ writer, Frank F Johnson. He underlines the difference between Marlowe’s Tragedy of Dr Faustus and what is happening in Goethe’s play. It’s done from memory, so forgive any errors.

Dr Faustus is of course the man of genius, the alchemist and philospher, who strikes a bargain with the devil to know all, and is also offered the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Troy. But in the end he losses his soul, and discovers he has been gazing into a magic mirror that has denied him life and reality, and caused his own damnation. Big words, out of a believing age, and perhaps the archetypal symbol of the writer, dreaming up and living above the world.

But what Goethe does with Faust, perhaps on the cusp of an age that a hundred years later began to talk of psychology, is rather different. He actually redeems the devil. Mephistopheles is the figure of pure genius, almost a thrilling primal energy, cynical about man, ruthless and tempting Faust, but also reconnecting him with the world. In Faust’s fall he is especially callous to the figure of Gretchen, the loyal and loving prostitute. But Johnson makes points about where Goethe is summoning these characters from, every time Mephistopheles enters, with his fire trailing dog.

To him, though a writer writing a play or story would be intuiting it, they are those firey regions of the unconscious, perhaps primitive animal nature too, the place where the devil lurks, in revolt against the God of consciousness and control. Like the image of Satan perhaps in Blake, Lucifer, the light bringer, another source of energy and revolt. It is seeing Gretchen’s love of Faust that Mephistopheles turns and begins to ask questions about the very perculiar animal – Man.

Johnson believes that there are almost clear stages in the evolution of Human Cosnciousness that have been marked by truly great works of literature. One is Shakespeare’s Hamlet, though written in the 16th Century, almost the archetype of modern and alienated consciousness. Caught between the word and the act, a new level in the self awareness of man, a self awareness that can become absolutely paralyising. Another to him is Goethe’s Faust, stepping out of the clutches of externalised religious forms, and placing the struggle entirely inside man and consciousness. So explaining that the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are necessary forces within us all.

It is not enough though just to quote a line from Hamlet like “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” although that is indeed a state of advanced self awareness. Hamlet’s is a tragedy too though, filled with death, the spectre of incest, though one that steps far beyond the normal dynamics of plot driven tragedies. A man whose ‘vicous mole in nature, wherein we are not guilty, for nature cannot choose its origins” is in part the heralder of the calamity and for Hamlet the rest is silence, just as life once again intervenes with a marshal drum.

Johnson is also very good on the echoes of Christian stories, to the story of man. He points out repeatedly that Christ, as real figure, or summoned biblical and literary one, kept saying “The Kingdom of Heaven is within.” He also points out that an all powerful and all loving God, would supposedly, at the end of time, redeem Satan too. Now to a psychologist who believes in the existence of the Unconscious, and a Universal Unconscious where in a sense man evolves culturally together, we cannot do without the psychic energy of the ‘devil’. It is when the manipulative will of Mephistopheles is unleased though that problems arise.

We fight ourselves, we fight others, but Johnson’s most beautiful take on life’s big secret comes in a very slim book on men, retelling the great myth, for a pre-Hamlet consciousness, of The Fisher King and The Grail Castle. Not everyone will get on with it, but a storyteller and story lovers will. It has Parsifal in search of the holy grail. Inside the Grail Castle, inside consciousness, he finds The Fisher King, wounded in spirit and in sexuality, able to watch the nightly panaoply of life and the Court, but unable to drink from the cup of life, the Grail.

There are many things at play in the texture of that story, most especially for Johnson what it says about real Manhood. Parsifal, able at last to take off his mother’s homespun, fails to ask the vital question “Who does the Grail serve?”. The question that only in the asking, at the right time, would heal the wounded King. So the magic precession vanishes, and Parsifal is banished from the castle, its drawbridge cliiping his horse’s hooves in stern reminder. For twenty hears he wanders in search of it, through blight, death, war and famine, until an old man tells him it is just around the corner, to the left. Johnson points out that the left in story, the sinistre, is most often associated with what is hidden, the occult and my extension the psychological, unconscious realm.

The story, that popular Christian myth, does not really have a satisfactory conclusion and Johnson believes that it needs re-writing, or continuing, to move mankind on again. He has some quite ravishing lines on the problems of Man, nature and the world today, fighting for resources, consuming the planet, but what might happen when the Kingdom of the Self is perfectly in balance outside and in. The bubbling spring of life, making everything bloom.

We had an idea to try with Percy Fell and The Magic Cup, set in New York city! A bit Harry Potter,
but perhaps that is the point. The intrinsic magic of the psyche has to move away from the conflicts of religion, to find new ways to address the battles of good and evil, conscious and unconscious and reintegrate the vital language both of science and psychology, with the language of the self and the creative spirit. Is there a crisis now? Many people live perfectly happily without any language of God. Perhaps it is enough to understand what Einstein was saying about langauge, and Science, when he said “you can either see everything as a miracle, or nothing as.”

Perhaps it just depends on what philosphy you inhabit, except when you get specific evidence of a link between the psyche and external reality, or coincidences became too great. Very unhappy evidence too, though fear is the worst in life. Reality and storytelling are too different things, and demand different responsibities. Joseph Campbell said the only real sin is when you try to speak from ‘the two worlds’ at the same time, because it can cause harm. But since there is so much harm, danger and hurt in the ‘real world’, scientifically brilliant as we are, and perhaps as rationally irrational too, maybe the harm is not to talk about it.

Paulo Coehlo writes hugely successful and very simple books, out of something that happened that concinvced him of both ‘God’ and the ‘Devil’ as important concepts. They are almost parables. We thought they were almost rubbish, but when you have obviously gone so far out, perhaps it is the only place you can go. Maybe he should write into that Fisher King story, though David actually thinks we need to hear from a modern woman.

Half Nelson, an American Cult movie of 2006 is truly special. It tells the story of an idealistic teacher, struggling in the American school system, with a secret; a drug habit that isolates him and pushes him back into the dark. So coping with the supposed purity and moral lessons he is supposed to show or impart in schools, does show in all his energy and imagination, as his mind and hope begins to crack. His real hope and in the end his redemption is his friendship with a young girl, who has no real parenting and whose brother is in prison for selling drugs, threatening to draw her into that world too. The moment she discovers her teacher’s real moral decline is brilliantly handled and the acting is great. It is the moment negative judgment does not step in, the moment there is no shock or outrage, just sadness and a quiet question. So the Songs of Innocence talk to the Songs of Experience, although a premise is that ‘children’ can be far tougher than you think, and his responsibility returns. It is just left with their friendship and an implicit pact to protect each other. If the hypocracy you sometimes find in America, well, anywhere, had won, then supposedly they would have called it Full Nelson, the grip you can’t escape!

As for going too overboard on the ‘great’ BBC dramas, the BBC’s The Night Watch, based on the novel by Sarah Waters, and about an interweave of primarily gay and lesbian relationships, around a writer and blitz ambulance crew, so using the theme of war and survival to explore various forms of fear, courage and betrayal, is real and well acted. It plays that time trick of trying to find out those moments where everything goes wrong, though a suicide pact is especially unconvincing, to explain in a snapshot why a young gay man is in Prison. It feels at times a bit too cosy about how tolerant England then really was too. The revelations in a novel like Eye in The Door, from The Regeneration Trilogy are far more challenging. It’s lines become a bit heavy too, echoing Churchill on where your life story starts or stops, with ‘you are only at the end of the beginning,’ or ‘why is it we can never love the people we ought?’, but on the other hand… ‘Why is it?’ Give us people though, people and more people, and defend the human.

In the vein of not allowing the Phoenix Founder to hurt himself anymore by returning to the past, we have now sectioned David in an enormous Palazzo in Rome, with huge sunny windows, lots of dancing girls, nice chesse and good wine, and told him to read Faust again – not Marlowe’s, Goethe’s. We have also awarded him an imaginary, life time-annuity for trying very hard, too hard, sometimes, while suggesting he turns his hand to comedy – making the jokes, not being it.

To be serious, we are delighted to publish something else from POLLIPIGGLEPUGGAR, hopefully to be read between adults and kids, by David Clement-Davies

MY SPACE SHIP COMET

I saw a Comet last night – a Comet shot passed my bed.
“Where are you going Comet?” I said.
Hang on then. Hang on to your tail – 60 million miles long.
Wow, now we’re in space, my Comet and me.
There’s planet Earth – round as a football,
Blue as a whale in the sea.
It’s like my bedroom with the lights out, up here in space.

Look, there’s the Moon with a clown girl’s face.
Hello Moon.
Somebody’s left flags on you.
You’re better than a spacehip, Comet.
You’re a huge ball of ice, Comet.
I’m riding a giant snowball flung through space.

LOOK OUT, COMET!
There’s Venus up ahead and, see, that’s Mercury too.
Help. Here comes the Sun.
You don’t like the Sun, do you Comet?
It makes your ice melt.

Come on then, off we go again, back passed the Earth.
Then out…out into the Solar System.
And there goes a spaceship floating along.
And satelites too. Satelites sending messages back to the Earth.
Where are you going to, satelites, out on your own?
Mars. YOU must be Mars. All fiery red.
Is there life on you, Mars?

Hello Jupiter, you’re a BIG planet. And Saturn. Beautiful Saturn.
If I could jump that far, I’d run right round your rings.
Look. There’s Pluto up ahead. You’re the last planet, Pluto.
And out there….
Are the stars.
All the stars I see from my bed.
Up here you look like giant fireworks.
And, LOOK, Galaxies too, spinning around.
You look like wonderful STARFISH.

OH NO! A BLACK HOLE.
A Black Hole’s like a bath tub, Comet, with the plug pulled out.
It swallows everything up.
It can pull out a planet thinner than spaghetti, Comet,
And then throw it to the other side of the Universe.

THE UNIVERSE.
Isn’t the Universe everything there is, Comet?
So if that Black Hole swallowed us up,
Like spaghetti,
And flung us to the other side of everything…
Then where would we be?

Would there be somebody living there like me, Comet,
Looking up through their window at the sky?
Or would I have three noses,
And two heads,
And sleep upside down in the middle of my bed?
You don’t know, do you comet?
You’re just a snowball, flung through space.

But I’ll tell you a secret, Comet. Just between me and you.
I get lonely sometimes, too.

Hey Comet, did you see? There goes an Alien, waving at me.
Goodbye Aliens, we’re going home.
And there’s Earth again, bigger and bigger.
That’s where I live, Comet.
I think I’ll get off now, Comet, if it’s O.K with you.
And there you go again, Comet, shooting off through the stars.
Goodbye Comet.
See you in 4000 years!

Copyright David Clement-Davies 2011. All Rights Reserved.

DCD is backing away from Young Adult books, to actually write and blog like an adult, on culture, ideas, others essays, thoughts and stories, and perhaps particularly on the differences between America and Europe. Those young adult stories though are a calling far too precious to really survive what happened in America, and the bottom line is that he became abusive, lost his own sense of responsibility, and it affected his language and his writing. The Telling Pool will be published to eBook, as will Scream of the White Bear, and the works out of PollipigglePuggar. The Pimpernels is currently a bit of a question mark. Things said here may be true, but that does not necesarrily justify them, particularly the invasion of others, because two wrongs do not make a right. We’ve blogged before that when such things happen in public, ‘everyone gets a black eye’. Actually the internet is not exactly ‘public’, because though it is a record, the vastness of it only means those reading it are aware. So we shouldn’t sweat it too much, though it can be far more a threat to the young, than gnarled old timers. If there is some self defence though, the invasion to him, and this story happened three years ago, was so hurtful and monumental, and over so long too, it can’t heal, but only leave deep scar tissue. Since he’s extremely proud of his epic books, he’ll have to wear that scar tissue with pride too, and protect his rights in the books that he does have ‘out there’. In one sense they belong only to the Reader, but as an object lesson in genuine and adult respect, they belong far more to the writer than they do to any publisher, good or bad.

Readers have often asked who David most associates with in his books. Fell is a rather obvious one, especially because it was written, or at least completed, during that failed journey in America. Fell and Larka are the opposites, the dark and the light, and again its interesting how the feminine Larka ‘redeems’ Fell, but with a kind of Christian love, the weight of which he is not sure is always healthy. It’s why the question is asked about what freedom is, even from legends, especially religious ones. But no writer is just one character, they have to inhabit the spaces and journeys of all of them. Actually, the character that most touched who he was, is probably Kar. Sad, that having once gone into the cave of near madness years back over love, he had to experience that again, in such a way and such a place. He did not need to, and it was such a fine line between happiness and disaster it has haunted him for three years.

To ‘Tarlar’ he has this message though. There are many ‘weapons’ in life, many ways we fight and grow, but in certain circumstances silence and inaction are the most vicious and irresponsible. He thinks he deserved more than that for two years of a life, and he certainly deserved more than that for ten years of a tough career. If he’s said things about others ‘past’s’ or families that perhaps he shouldn’t, because if we reach back into the past of mankind, let alone our own families, it is a story of dark and light, and so what, none of us are to blame for the past, only responsible for the present and future. He has spoken far more loudly about his own difficulties and the possible causes but the ’cause’ above all was having to return to an emotional place that as a functioning and rather strong adult he had long superceeded. Though a very precient 12 year old wrote once to pick up the line that explains almost the whole dynamic of a book like The Sight. It comes during the great battle sequence and is something like “as if the whole thing were just two people arguing in a room, accusing each other of not showing enough love.”

Life and balance is not about an argument at all, it’s very easy indeed, but in those circumstances he does accuse her of not showing enough love, and not enough maturity either. Love personally, but also something that has nothing to do with ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ a relationship, first a genuine acknowledgement, but then a love for his attemtps in stories. Some women think the male psyche is an obvious thing, and it is far more complex than they know, maybe especially a storyteller’s. You can’t stop time though, the world can be very nasty, badness must be fought against, and invasion resisted. Fantasy and reality got far, far too close too, as did ‘the public’ and ‘private’. This would not have happened if she had had the respect to turn to him in person and ask if it was all right to do a book like ‘Hew, Screw and Glue’ in such circumstances. Had confronted, not with any drama, just genuine respect, rather than always avoided and always gone behind the scenes. But on the other hand perhaps losing the person he knew, and the man he suddenly recognised in himself again, was actually just far too precious to be able to cope with being tied to that firm and those memories. Tolstoy suggested when love fails men go to war. They should certainly walk ten thousand miles away, and struggle through the Amazon, found new civilisations and learn to laugh again.

To SVM he’ll just say good bye. A book, or the supposed psychic content of that book is never to be revealed until it is actually finished, because it is a journey. There was literally no understanding of the relation between storytelling and ‘real’ life, but above all no protection of the vital electric link between author and editor. Because of a supposedly private matter, there was also absolutely no editorial honesty either. If life were only about ‘shoulds’ David should never have accepted the commission on Scream of the White Bear. But the argument about The Pimpernels really was to try and release a different kind of energy. If a partner could so go on about ‘ultimatums’, the ultimatums that came down from that firm were outrageous. From forcing a title, to ‘give us another Fire Bringer’ to ‘you can do better than that’. But on the other hand no one person can be held responsible for others actions or inactions at a firm, and once no real peace was allowed, where on earth could anyone go? HR for a long time, specifically resisted attacking though, but an editor chose to play bad cop and start issuing prescriptions and judgements all over the place. David tried to talk to H because he needed a man to understand, and to be ‘on his side’, and an editor was just too close to the source of hurt. Unfortunate David bumped into both an editor and ex together on a big street in dear old New York City. Absurd. He did not need to be that frightened, or that pathetic. It was a return to a past that was done with. Nor is he ‘a fictional character’ as that Changing Hands t-shirt proclaimed, because that really is the realm of the psycho. David is only a fictional character when in the process of writing and creating. Then he’s Lord Voldemart and Harry Potter too, and a lot else besides. But if he had the magic he’d summon a Patronus charm and give it to everyone alive, including Tricia Kallet, Michael Jacobs, HR and the doorman. Because we are all real people and we all matter very much. He did summon blessings. It was about lighting candles in Chatres Cathedral, when he was terribly frightened and terribly alone, and it began the healing. But since you have read a lot of literature and we all make mistakes, even DCD(!), perhaps we’ll just share a poem, out of the driving imaginative passion of great literature:

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear —
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Dear Reader,

with respect, you are a ridiculous lot, because we now have physical evidence, an ‘experiential model’, that the ‘hits’ at Phoenix Ark Press, hit me up baby, only really go up exponentially when we start blogging about difficult, painful, or even scandalous issues. Which just goes to show that the rat like journalist trying to justify the appalling mongering on the dying News of the World , or perhaps just morphing into online forms, was right when he suggested that’s what the public really want to read about. Or perhaps it’s nobler than that, and in the maelstrom of scorn and noise, the sound and the fury, you want to hear something that is actually deeply felt and true. A hunger for depth among the superficiality? Whoever you are by the way, from the psycho, which is a bad idea, to the seriously literate, which is also a bad idea, we have no idea, because that is the on-line world, or just the world. Please try to be seriously literate, not that we have anything at all against anyone who was not taught to read. We have read a book called Language and Silence, and we are not making any money at all!

So, since the founder is probably senile and can’t remember who quite said what, but somebody once said you should always use all your experience in your art, perhaps we should start being more and more scandalous, or try and touch the on-line glories of Mrs Huffington Puffington, who sold her blog to something like Forbes Magazine for lots and lots of money. But then she had a lot of ‘associates’. Ah, the corrupted heart. Or perhaps, with serious work we should just plough on, with some integrity, and try and talk and create. A friend suggested today, with all the glorious eagerness of the new idea, though Becket said ‘dawn broke on the nothing new’, that we start doing an online novel, as it is written, when we have been doing that all along, with Dragon in The Post. But since we reiterate we are actually not making any money, and that is your fault (!), apart from being ours, it would be nice to have some feed back, good or bad, on the quality of story. Funnily enough, it is very nice to know that there is some connection, because that’s what any writer feels, with triumph or humility, when they have an audience, actually the reader as a friend, as Jonathan Franzen said, powerful enough to send a shiver through his publisher, when they were crap! Though the dream of something happening on a world scale is probably just an absurd one. Storytelling and literature are not about some great world revelation, just the measure of a journey to maturity, if it has any real meaning or value. What is it we want to happen on a world scale? Anthony Newly (you are too young, even if you are too old, and can’t remember), mad and ugly as he was, starred in the musical ‘Stop the World, I want to get off’. Maybe it really is just a silly cry from the heart and soul to understand and confirm, but there are worse things. Not much, but there are.

Yours with affection, and sincerely,

Phoenix Ark Press