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. 

The bravest writer, John Pilger.

John Pilger today accepted the Sydney Peace Prize 2009 at Sydney Opera House. He had some things today that has distinct relevance to this blog.

Early in his oration Pilger attacked Australian policy with regards to the “boat people”, those unfortunates who flee to the shores of the great continent only to end up in what Pilger calls concentration camps like the one at Woomera. He asked how they would all feel if the boats were filled with white people. He remarked on the hypocrisy of Rudd who declared undying sympathy for the refugees early in his office and only recently declared that ” a hard line” must be taken against them. Pilger went on to castigate the rule of silence among journalists everywhere who “seem to know what not to say” without being told. He cited his own experience as a film maker, broadcaster and journalist in support of the assertion,  which indeed requires no support.  He pointed to mind control on the part of the media in service to political ideology. (The silence surrounding Travels with Li Po is owed in large measure to just that.)

“One of my favourite plays is Harold Pinter’s  “Party Time”.  He tells of the plot … a bunch of people are at a party in an apartment like any other middle-class soiree in Sydney or elsehwere. “But something is happening outside in the street, something terrible and oppressive for which  the people at the party share responsibility.” There is a moment’s uneasiness as the chatter stops for a second and then the laughter resumes.”

Pilger uses this as a methaphor for society at large. “How many of us live in that apartment?” 

“I believe that if we begin to apply  justice and courage to human affairs we begin to make sense of our world.” 

Silence he went on to say, recalling his experience of South African Apartheid, is the effect of tyranny. The citizens of Johannesburg lived a few kilometres from a shanty town where people wasted in poverty and their children died of disease but  these repectable citizens “looked from the side and did nothing.”

Australians, he went on, have become adepts at divide -and-rule where blacks who blame their own people for their misfortunes are welcomed and applauded.  Western Australia jails indigenous people at eight times the rate of the South African Apartheid figure.  Australia is internationally shamed for its treatment of  blacks.

“We discriminate on the basis of race. That’s it in a nutshell.”

Rights to land that were granted to the indigenous population of the Northern Territory in 1970 were clawed back by John Howerd by means of bribery and bullying. The Rudd government is doing the same. Leases are bought in with threats of basic amenities and services being witheld.

“You see, there are deals to be made… Foreign companies want a piece of the action”. ( For uranium and other minerals).

“Silences can be broken if we will it.”

“Tom Paine warned long ago that if we were denied critical knowledge we should storm, what he called, The Bastille of words. We need an Autralian Glasnost, … which broadly means, awakening, transparency, diversity, justice, disobedience…”

“In every newsroom, in every media college, teachers of journalism and journalists themselves need to be challenged about the part they play in the bloodshed, inequity and silence that is so often presented as normal.”

“What terrifies the agents of power is an awakening of people, of public consciousness. This is already happening in countries in Latin America where people have discovered a confidence in themselves they didn’t know existed. We should join them before our own freedom of speech is quietly withdrawn and real dissent is outlawed as the powers of the police are expanded. The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Pilger then called for a treaty guaranteeing universal land rights and a proper sharing of the resources of  Australia. The path to self-respect he warned for Australians as for any other nation lies in demanding  justice.

We agree with every word of the above with the proviso that justice is not to be “attained” as such but is only possible with the removal of injustice. You do not create ‘justice’. You make it possible. We take leave to point out that Travels with Li Po was inherenty an indictment of society that was purposefully transformed by the status quo into a fantasy …. to make money. The war is waged in the sphere of mind as it is in the hills of Iraq. AThat is what St. Paul meant by “principalities and powers” and that too, albeit in a different way, is what John Pilger is saying and why we quote him at length.