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. 

It is expressly forbidden for anyone to use anything in this blog in the service of litigation or lawsuits for or against Rowling or anyone associated with her. This blog and all its contents are the copyright of the authors – The Bogside Artists. If you would like to make use of whatever is here presented you would be advised to contact the artists in person. Breach of this copyright would be a very serious matter.

© The Bogside Artists

Art and the artist’s life

It is often asked of us, why we painted our murals and we have given an exhaustive account of why in our book  The People’s Gallery. In the excerpt below Solzhenitsyn throws a glaring light on the reason why artists cannot bow to violence whatever form it takes and why freedom of speech is the life and spirit of art and of a nation’s collective life.  Artistic expression is not just the voice of an individual but the voice of a people and the voice of mankind. He knew well enough, as do we , that the forces of violence against it and the truth it speaks emanate not from the ground up but from the political games-masters and bureaucratic functionaries who weild power ‘legally’ or otherwise from the top. Only when the media weed class privileges and affiliations out of its editorial policy and implant the democratic principles they are supposed to defend will we have freedom of speech proper. But that,  of course , is when the wheels fall off and truth takes over from media induces narcosis and collective hypnosis. And that too is when the oligarchs, the dictatorial executives and the incurable narcissists holding poitical office resort to what keeps them in power in the first place – the gun. Hear now from someone who paid dearly for what many among you striding meekly off to their places of work, swinging briefcases, trimly dressed and ever-so proud of their societal clout and Luciferian allegiances are hell-bent in preventing – your freedom to express – your creative birthright – your freedom of speech!

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

       “One Word of Truth…”

His Nobel Speech 1970

“But woe betide that nation whose literature is interrupted by the interference of force. This is not simply a violation of the ‘freedom of the press’; it is the locking up of the national heart, the carving up of the national memory. Such a nation does not remember itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and although its population supposedly have a common language, fellow countrymen suddenly stop understanding eachother. Mute generations live out their lives and die without telling either to their own or to a future generation. If such geniuses as Akhmatova or Zamyratin are walled up alive for the duration of their lives, if they are condemned to create in silence until the grave, without hearing any response to what they have written, then this is not just their personal misfortune but the deep tragedy of the whole nation – and too, a threat to the whole nation. And in certain cases it is a danger for the whole of mankind….when the whole of history ceases to be understood because of that silence.”