“To have been… or not to have been. That is the query.” ( Prince Mc Hamish of Scotland.)

       Plagiarism – The Ransacking of Another’s Soul.

         How to Tweak your Way to Ignominious Glory.

There are many types of plagiarism. It goes on in many disciplines from music to painting, from mathematics to medicine. It goes on from the simple story called “Finding Nemo” to the high-flying speeches of presidents. From lazy little Johnny sneaking a peek at his fellow student’s answers during exams to shysters avid for letters after their names offering theses by forgotten graduates, signatures substituted, in their demand for a doctorate they could never possibly win on their own merits. Proving it is difficult; and if the plagiarism is eminently successful you will need people of the same misfit sociopathy as yourself to fight in your corner.  Of course, the crime is indefensible no matter who is fighting your corner.

                        “Competitive Plagiarism”  is the most obnoxious form of the disease. This is where the malfeasant is motivated by the conviction based on self-inflated notions of his ‘abilities’; “anything you can do I can do better.” Providing of course you show me what and how. Just give me the text and explain to me how you created it bit by bit and ….I will take it from there. Ciao!

                        Salieri who is alleged to have pilfered the work of Amadeus Mozart falls into this category. The predator, in other words, takes the work of the other as  THE GIVEN  on which to stamp their own name and creates nothing by way of novel invention worth a damn. The goal is not in the service of art, not to improve on something pre-existing for the sake of art, assuming one’s talent is commensurate with one’s arrogance,….but to steal. Else one would acknowledge one’s source. In their defense, self-righteous plagiarists (as they all must be) will cite precedents, genres etc, whatever indeed will make the original creator look like a plagiarist himself. The plagiarist’s philosophy if thieves can be said to have one is that “all creators pilfer the ideas of others. I am no different but I can prove I am better at it.” Salieri might well refer to Mozart’s teacher Haydn or Bach to justify his theft. Fact is, Salieri is incapable of writing anything comparable on his own which is why he is driven to plagiarism in the first place, irrespective of whose shoulders Mozart may have stood on to create his own divine music. Apologists for Salieri and his ilk are all over the net. By the same token you will find people in your junk mail telling you you have won a million bucks if you just contact them to pick it up. Salieri is said to have been Mozart’s ‘friend’. Greed hath no friends.

                        Any schoolboy of twelve or over indeed can tell you how to go about your “borrowing” of ideas. For example, there is nothing new in the story of Hamlet. There are precedents in literature that go all the way back to Oedipus about the prince bent out of shape over his mother and her new lover who has usurped his father’s status and kingship. Freud wrote about its prevalence in myth and named the complex after Oedipus. Unaware that there are only 36 plots possible in the whole of literature according to recent findings Shakespeare would derive his plots from history books and other works by Boccaccio, Brooke, Holinshead etc. Ergo, I can pillage the plot of Hamlet with impunity just as Salieri might have pillaged the work of Mozart. There is nothing new in it after all. All I need is the essential tried-and-tested idea. THE MAIN IDEA. I can do with the rest as I will. Once I have that I can pillage the mighty scenes of  the ghost of  Hamlet’s father appearing to him on the battlements, the Mousetrap Play to unmask Claudius, the death and madness of Ophelia, the final showdown and death of the hero in a sword fight etc, etc.

                        Hamlet indeed is a good example because the plot is complex. The cake is rich and from it you can extract all sorts of ingredients if you are that desperate and barren. You keep the style of writing of course and the world of the play, tweaking this and tweaking that, tweaking here and tweaking there, until your little heart is content. “To be or not to be” becomes, under the laser of your ‘genius’ (After all you are now greater than your impudent rival Mr. Shakespeare) …. “To have been or not to have been.”  You blush at your own powers of creativity, at how you have moved the ghost from the battlements to the dungeons; the Mousetrap is renamed the Flytrap; and you positively weep when you fling Ophelia into a lake instead of a brook as the author had intended. It is all soooo you! You see your own reflection in every tweak. Tired of tweaking you may even get ‘professional tweakers’ marshalled  by your so-called ‘literary’ agent to take over for you while you dream of riches and fame and meeting the queen and learn how to pass yourself off as a saint from your PR people. Won’t daddy be proud?

                         Finally, you give your Hamlet black hair instead of blond, make him good with pistols instead of sword, remove him from stupid old Denmark, install him in a castle in Edinburgh and call your concoction “McHamish Prince of Scotland”.  A masterpiece is born! All kneel. You have won at last. People will call you a ‘great’ writer. But people are gullible as your agent, who is firmly on your side (at least until the shit hits the fan) has no doubt counseled you. As for the author you pillaged, in the words of Ophelia – “O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown”. You know what you have done of course. And you cannot Un-Know it try as you might.

                        Et Caïn dit « Cet oeil me regarde toujours!  (Victor Hugo “La Conscience”.)

                         Next, in the illustrious company of whoever else has helped you commit your crime you have your story peddled to the publishing houses. Of course that is all just for the gullible. The pre-selected grabs his long-awaited product with both hands and sets about interesting the rest. They smell money in it which is all that concerns them. Their market researchers tell them it is time for just such a story. The world is hungry for your inconsolable hero. Mc Hamish has winner written all over him  and they buy up the copyrights. Trees are felled by the myriad and books shipped everywhere by night and day and, of course, film producers fall over themselves for their take of the ‘universal’ cake. The thing is a smash hit and Disney includes Mc Hamish’s castle in its theme park complete with ghost in the dungeons and the thrilling pistol-duel at the end. By then ,of  course, you have rehearsed your lines for the press; about how ‘inspired’ you were by a great idea that just fell into your lap out of the heavens where you now dwell, how you slaved and toiled into the wee hours giving shape to your masterpiece, how you sacrificed health and well-being in the style of the great Romantics (whose shoes you are not worthy to unlace), to bring forth your masterpiece…. and all the rest of it. Pabulum for the paying public for whom you have as much contempt as for the man you ripped off. Your agent protects you from very dangerous things like questions,unsolicited interviews and unexpected visitors.

                         And if your new-found wealth does not succeed in preventing you from being dragged into court by Shakespeare’s protectors, those messengers of Hugo’s eternal Eye devoted to the integrity of the creative soul of Mankind, your legal hounds can argue that your play is “similar to”  but not really the same. After all, Shakespeare’s ghost was younger, had a beard, didn’t speak in Glaswegian slang, appeared on the battlements for crying out loud not in the dungeons, was a swordsman not a gun-toter, his girl was called Ophelia and there is no connection at all betwen “Ophelia” and Agnes Ofeelme, etc, etc, etc, etc. Your fans have been educated into being appalled at the very notion that your genius that they crave in their sleep to emulate is being called into question. They sing hymns with anxious teachers for your vindication. Middle-class newspapers that serve the interests of those who have been creaming off from your theft rally with all the ruthlessness you deployed to commit it gather in their clubs to defend your innocence. Your agent and political gurus rejoice that they had the foresight to cast you as a saint in the way Maggie Thatcher was cast as a firm but sensitive Head Mistress. Everything is panning out perfectly. You are inviolable…… or so you think, now managing director of the magic theatre whose floors you used to scrub. Who can get at you? But, a large eye follows you to bed at night and in the morning as you draw your curtains it is staring at you from the horizon.

                        Of course, most of us know Hamlet - one of the greatest plays ever written. But we are not really talking about Hamlet per se. Nor Shakespeare for that matter. They are just similes for the sake of argument. It would be damn difficult to rip off Shakespeare without acknowledging him even though most lawyers can easily prove he is dead and a fair few that is is still alive and dines regularly with Elvis in Clapham. The Bard for all that is established forever.

                        But, what if your source is another book by an author that only a few people know about, an obscure writer whose story never quite got the fanfare treatment yours was guaranteed to get even before you began to paste it together?  What if it was a story ahead of its time that was allowed to sink into obscurity like the paintings of El Creco that were only rediscovered centuries after his death? For example, what if the story and the world within it was created by a doting father for his son. What then?

      Et, comme il s’asseyait, il vit dans les cieux mornes
L’oeil à la même place au fond de l’horizon.
Alors il tressaillit en proie au noir frisson.
        Cachez-moi !  cria-t-il; et, le doigt sur la bouche,…..

                        What I have explained by analogy is, as far as I am concerned, how it is done by plagiarists everywhere who are driven by greed and ambition. You need neither flair, nor imagination. You need to know only how to read, photocopy and to write. And, we can all write. Can’t we?

Cover of Li Po

An Interview

with the author of Travels with Li Po.

Interview with William Kelly

(Q) How do you explain the lack of interest in Travels With Li Po and your allegations about it?

(A) There are a number of reasons. First of all, I suspect Rowling’s legal hounds are deterring any interested party from investigating the whole Harry Potter thing. What they are saying to inquirers is designed expressly to stop them in their tracks.That is their job. A Gorilla would stop any man in his tracks just by roaring from a mile away. The Gorilla knows this of course. Likewise, defamation lawyers are usually heard to some affect by good citizens such as editors and journalists who are trying to hold onto their jobs, families and careers. Having the right to threaten with punishment that is backed up by the State gifts them with power over the little man in the street. They are very likely using the apology wrestled out of the Derry News to substantiate their ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ statements, an apology which we repudiate and which should never have been made in the first place and was only made because that paper was faced with extinction if the editor did not cry “enough!” from the power-grip he was under.

Violence takes many forms: just because it is delivered by fax instead of gunfire doesn’t fool anyone who has been targeted by it. Justice itself, of course, is impartial or so we all want to believe. In practice it is anything but, political interests usually holding sway over both reason and a plaintiff’s lawful democratic rights. That apology was to drive us off the pitch by discrediting us. The Bogside Artists were certainly damaged by it, regardless, and for the reason I have just given. Our gullible public bows to all things legal the way savages prostrate themselves before the witchdoctor and for the same reason – out of fear of reprisal by unknown forces. The other reason is that people have been weaned on Harry Potter and “there are none so blind etc….” Sad, but true. Lastly, and most of the responses I have received so far fall into this category. They all say the same thing; “This cannot be true”, we are told, because I took so long to make it public. If truth was determined by that criterion most of the history books in your library, including the gospels, would never have seen the light of day and a man may well feel free to act on the conviction that his wife is a liar because she should have told him sooner that she was pregnant…. but you cannot argue with such people. It is beyond them to imagine a world in which Harry Potter did not exist. I have no difficulty there because I lived in that world and could see all around me the crying need for a role-model for kids that could proffer a palliative for their pain and give insight and validation to their own confused experience of living. That is where the VISION came from. If you think it descended magically on a woman during a train journey who dreamt of becoming a writer…. you need to talk to somebody.

(Q) And the book itself?

(A) Those who get it, get it, because the magic is in the book itself and how it impacts you. That was one of the philosophical premises for writing it in the first place, to clarify for all the guiding principle I cherished then and still do …… that art itself is magic, or a form of it. And I believe you can experience this in Li Po…..if you let it, that is. What I must stress here is that Travels with Li Po was never intended to be anything but the mould from which the series would be cast. I would certainly not have published it in its present state. Its purpose was to showcase the VISION I had without giving too much away. I was dealing in simple ideas and themes that I knew full well could so easily be pilfered.  Li Po is conspicuously a BLUEPRINT of a VISION;  and I stressed  to just about every publisher to whom I sent my customary three chapters and synopsis, that it bore “little resemblance to the finished version.”  We published it as is because we wanted to make that abundantly clear. Its present form is its original form and would not have been its final form. It doesn’t follow, mind you, that I would have purged everything that is already there. The text  would have remained mostly, if not entirely intact, but certain features of it and especially the personality of the hero would have been amplified. That is because what I did and had to do at the time was underplay very significant elements of character and plot and often only hinted at things I intended to elaborate on greatly later once I had been given the green light.

As it transpired, certain people plied me with questions about it because they knew this was the actual BLUEPRINT for a series quite outside their usual experience of children’s stories and they wondered how they could make their own version. Like a bunch of delinquents who have spotted a Golden Eagle glide into their back yard, they just had to snare it. They smelled money in it and very little else and knew damn well that, given the critical approach to society that I intended to take and had already made clear, I would have problems getting into print. And with my central character an Irishman? Place your bets. In the end, they stole the entire VISION, scaffolding, tools, bricks, mortar, the lot.  “And they rejoiced in their wickedness,” as the Bible puts it. If you read Li Po again with all this in mind you might get the magic of it. If you are conditioned with Fugleman Potter you are likely beyond recall. If you care not for the truth you probably have other reasons for reading thus far. Whoever you are, take the advice of a wise old man; – “trust nobody in the publishing industry unless you can get them to sign a contract promising you their organs should you require one!” Even then…………….

Will teaching his writing class.

William Kelly – author of Travels with Li Po.

William, one of  the trio of muralists known as The Bogside Artists and their press officer, has always been interested in writing. “I still write,” says he. “But my faith in the publishing industry and their agents is now zero and I see no reason to change my attitude. A Wilde or a Shaw would be an impossibility these days given the power agents have garnered for themselves  from gloabilisation and the mass marketing it affords. These tin gods manage their charges the way a general manages his tanks not with a view to throwing new light on the human condition but to fill their pockets in the service of a world view that would make a suir rat cringe with shame. Basically, it is every man for himself, to use whatever method comes to hand….. and to the winner the spoils. If that is not the main disease of this world outstripping all other contaminants you care to mention I would like to know what is. And what exactly  this socially accepted ego-serving attitude has to do with the fruitage of the human spirit we call  ‘literature’  beats the hell out of me. Wilde and Shaw, if they were alive,  would have been swiftly and mercilessly ruined by  defamation lawyers  -those guardians of the collectively espoused fiction called ‘character’  -  for exercising their creative freedom in criticizing public figures, a service that they rightly considered the singular most important responsibility of their profession.  The theatre of ancient Athens incidentally not only allowed such criticism  but encouraged it. That means that professional ethics and honest reportage have been swept aside and made redundant in the face of the Gadarene rush for profits. Culture, as we know it, is banjaxed you could say. What Marx called the “falsification of consciousness” rules in exactly the same way as aggressively repetitive brainwashing strives to perpetuate  itself as  ’music’. The sacred has disappeared from the fine arts and truth, for want of a better word, from popular creative fiction. There is no money in truth any more than there is money in good health. Society maintains its necessary quota of sick citizens by keeping them hoodwinked, brainwashed and misinformed.  Travels with Li Po was my humble attemtp to bring all this to the intelligence of the young. Many writers these days don’t even write to be read by the average Joe  but specifically by movie executives who are to  juvenile sex-driven plots and gratuitous action-scenes what pigs are to  truffles.  They pilfer and eploit the collective memory, rehashing the same old stuff over and over in ever more devious forms of disguise, with about as much conscience as a fox in a chicken coop. Posterity, at any rate, will find it a whole lot easier to sift the wheat from the chaff because the chaff is everywhere.  My autobiography is about the only literary endeavour that interests me at present. What I have to say about writing, art, philos0phy  and the craziness of the world I was born into, will be expressed there. 

                                            FORBES On Potter.

                   Forbes is America’s business think-tank mag.

Below is a quote from an early article (2001) article on the Potter phenomenon.

Seemingly the writer has no difficulty in accepting that a woman who never had a brother has suddenly become an expert in juvenile male psychology nor has even doubted for a second her claims to orginal creation. What he does do however is shed light on how and why a fantasy is manicured, tailored and marketed for mass consumption. Worth reading for all sorts of reasons. Here is the link to the complete article.  Forbes  on Potter.

“The ironic part is that Harry Potter doesn’t need the help. The young wizard himself is the greatest British hero since James Bond. Rowling is a worthy successor to Ian Fleming, who, incidentally was a pretty fair children’s book writer, too, having penned Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The books are so popular that the movie would have been wildly anticipated, no matter how it was released. Harry Potter is such a skilled wizard, he might be allowed to work his own magic. He could hit his home runs even without a juiced ball or a corked bat. “

Flattering stuff don’t you think? from someone wrestling with the ‘given’ but expressing not a single doubt as to its origin. The timely creation of a hero for the age does not seemingly even merit the simple question of how this inevitability could possibly have found expression in an “idea” if you please that popped into a woman’s head during a train journey. Interestingly, it is the whole train idea itself that the Adrian Jacobs litigants are sueing over. Indeed, you could be forgiven for thinking that the shennanigans of Rowling’s script writers reflect the obsessive determination of shysters trying to prove righful ownership to something that never did and never could havc belonged to any of them, covering their tracks, as it were,  even before they have made them, to be certain of winning a case should it ever come to court as theyare most assuredly afraid it some day will.  Deplorable stuff in our view…. we who have taken great pains to set the record straight as the plumb- line we use for our murals … for all to see. Clearly, the architects of this “phenomenon” ( and that would include the alleged ’creator’) were smugly convinced from the start that once the product called Potter was accepted and enjoyed by countless kids queries as to its authenticity would be readily snuffed out by means of tacit support from the guard dogs of the  media (especially the British media bloated as ever with their imperial delusions), - brutally  aggressive legal tactics protecting alleged copyright and on-going relentless self-fortification against any form of scrutiny from any source.

 This shamelessly amoral  game has been going on for quite some time and will only end when every single penny that can be extracted from Potter has made it loyal way to the coffers of the coporations and their subsidiaries both sides of the Atlantic who have been feeding off the commercial brew  for well  over a decade. The truth is Harry Potter was hijacked from a previous creation. End of story. And his true origins lie in the purgatory of  political conflict in Northern Ireland not in a silly daydream. From the battle front of collective tragedies, let us repeat ….. not from an “idea”.

It is atonishing to us that ‘intelligent’ people, writers and journalists would you believe?, men with degrees as long as your stupidity, teachers of literature etc, etc, have bought into this cock-and-bull crap with scarcely a one asking a single serious question as to the authenticity of Rowling’s claims when it is glaringly obvious to anybody who is not a congenital retard that the source must clearly be elsewhere. This blog is to make it clear to you where that ELSEWHERE actually is and indeed why Potter exists at all.

Just to let everyone know we have updated our Travels with Li Po website. This website is devoted exclusively to the book written by one of us ( William) all about a young orphaned boy who is lost in a parallel world and doesn’t know he is a sorcerer. Yea, sounds corny and fantastical and we made it all up, didn’t we?  It is in fact all true and alarmingly so. We KNOW it to be true. Find out for yourself  by clicking on the book icon. Then, be astonished. Be very astonished; and when you are done being astonished see if you can answer the simple questions the book  poses by its sheer existence and why it is such a hot potato for newspapers in general. Here is a hint……starts with ‘p’ and ends with ‘tics”.

We have placed a button on the pages linking to an abridged version of the numerous similarities between Harry Potter and Wills’ book for your instruction – THE  SIMILARITIES – Synopsis  it’s called. This is in deference to modern readers who find it difficult to read more than two sentences in a row without getting dizzy. Pay particular attention to the brief introduction that goes with it. If you have any other questions feel free to contact us.

In the meantime, Adrian Jacobs’ posse  is preparing to begin its charge on Rowling and Co. for a mere half billion pounds, declaring, in so many words, that that is what the deceased would have been worth for his contribution (?) to the Harry Potter bonanza. De plot tickens, as they say down South.  Mind you, the Rowling boys have had a decade to prepare for just this eventuality. And with so much preparation and mini-rehearsals you have to wonder why they haven’t had a go  at us, as we have no doubt whatever that we are the main event, Rowling’s worst nightmare indeed, as you will quickly learn if you visit the site.  What are they afraid of? Evidence my friends. Evidence that would damn them all. It is a rhetorical question indeed, one of the best. And of course, the scandal. What would the neighbours think? Especially those American neighbours who have capitalized hand over fist on the Potter ‘phenomenon’ and its Britanic  pedigree that stretches all the way to the  corridors of  ’smarter-than-thou’ Oxford, every Yankee egghead’s pet fantasy, albeit paling into nothing beside the enshrined American Dream…  Hugh Hefner’s throne.

It will be mighty interesting indeed to see what comes of it all, especially for us who are privy to the real truth that no English paper dare touch or Irish paper for that matter. Cowards all! So much for freedom of speech. As for freedom of the press…that depends on who can threaten the responsible editors most efficiently. The toy bear in that regard goes to Schillings, Rowling’s lawyers, based in London who have a knack of frightening the life-insurance out of everybody they go near in the manner of Darth Vader in a barrister’s wig.  We pause here to wonder if we got that right. Maybe Schillings  have jumped ship in the meantime and we get a letter from them in the morning telling us to recant our “inaccuracies’ and ‘false statements” or face ruin. Dat’s the way dem dudes work …. like a police-helicopter tracking a suspect vehicle, at night, all lights blaring, its deafening megaphonic words soaring over the rooftops. Pensioners awake in their beds searching for the lamp-switch wondering who the hell has the right, etc, etc.  One cannot be too careful these days.  

Scrutiny, all joking aside, is what the Rowling gang are avoiding, pure and simple. Incredible to us how this obvious fact, this necessary but deplorable, puerile bloody strategy they have been implementing for years  is either ignored or swept under the carpet by the  media in toto. But then, we are talking about jolly old England, old bean, Rule Britannia and all that…. and Harry The Prince Potter, of course, who is but John Bull Junior on a stick flying the old Imperial flag over the subdued and conquered with all the fatuous panache of an ageing Caesar in a squeaky chariot doing a triumphal circuit of the Circus Maximus just before the games, strapped to his vehicle in case he falls off.  What ever happened to good old TRUTH? we ask ourselves.  Has it been sacrificed in our ‘post-modern world ‘ to the shenanigans of Chaos Theory? Truth, like art, is whatever I decide it to be, or so we must subscribe to if we wouldst call ourselves ‘contemporary’, (fancy wording for ‘Trumpism’ or economic expediency-whatever-the-cost-to-others. “You’re fired boyo! Take up your dreams and leave the premises!”). ”Greed is good” indeed says Wall Street, even if on film, just as genocide is ‘ethnic cleansing’ effected with duster and polish and a nice clean apron…. and Harry Potter is the real deal.  Maggie’s ”ugly face of capitalism”, in other words, is whatever mask you choose to wear and whatever script you choose to espouse that will enable you to stash your pile  in the big steel box down at the bank. Our view is simple…. TRUTH WILL OUT, sooner or later. It goes on. It never goes away.  And we all  must stand up for it or cease to be human.