our flag

A sound question. Addressed to home-grown pseudo-revolutionaries in particular, especially those who take sledgehammers to crack peanuts. Never mind the multi-conglomerates, the state protected polluters of oceans and rivers, the high-rollers of Monaco or Vegas who think nothing of tossing away a million or two on the flip of a card, the billionaires who lust for ever greater and greater power, the war-mongers and political spin doctors who haunt the corridors of Washington and London planning the ,merciless subjugation of small struggling nations like Nicaragua or Afghanistan.  No, the real enemy are three Derry men from the slums of the Bogside, spawned from the lowest level of the working class, socialists to a man please note, who are trying to scratch a living from their art – the murals they painted for the people of Derry and which attract many thousands of visitors per year. Socialist murals indeed which we intended from the start even if the pseudo’s have neither the sensibilities or the intelligence to recognise that simple fact.

Targeted by the jealous, the petty-minded, the misinformed, the greedy and self-deluded fantasists masquerading as “revolutionaries’ who seemingly can sleep through all of their astonishing contradictions like babes in straw, snug in their self-appointed roles as liberators of mankind and blessed, would you believe ?, with an all-embracing love for the oppressed everywhere except those of course, like us, they are determined to add to the pile.   We three, it seems, The Bogside Artists, provide these idiots with a mighty cause to serve – What mighty cause? Why preventing us, in homage to the class we represent, from earning an honest  living from our labours by denigrating our work and our names.  How proud they must be of themselves and how humbled by their mighty achievement. What achievement?  Well…. you would need to ask them, unless you count working in the employ of  even bigger idiots than even they, an ‘achievement’. We are still here is what this blog is here to state. That is our flag flying in the breeze by the way, just outside our studio. Our flag of independence. The price we have paid? Contact us and we will be happy to tell you. It is not over until The Fat Tyrant learns to sing and the fanatic understands that the system is his real target and not the ordinary folk who are trying to earn a living against the oppression of these –  its most ruthless practitioners.

So Rowling is being sued? Surely not. Well, it’s a change from dragging others into court. This time, interestingly, her elusive agent Little and the equally shy and retiring Bloomsbury subsidiary of the prosperous mine are being led into the fray. Well, why let Rowling have all the limelight to herself? say we. “The allegations of plagiarism made today, Monday 15 June 2009, by the Estate of Adrian Jacobs are unfounded, unsubstantiated and untrue,” said a statement from Bloomsbury, which publishes Harry Potter in Britain. Now, where did we hear those very words before? Sounds like Schillingsspeak to us or Blairspeak or some hybrid of the two or just plain, old crapolegalese. All those orchestrated interviews and the equally, jingoistic and conspicuouly rehearsed promotional TV doc with Little (who should, by rights, be expected to trumpet his great discovery mega voce  to the world), barely visible. We got a glimpse of his back as he sauntered off down the street, Rowling at his elbow, swinging a briefcase containing the latest edition of HP that its author sheepishly declared “some people might think of as rubbish”. How right was she? She did not, let it be said, to use her own words, appear at her “most fraudulent” when she said it. Here is their great opportunity to affirm once and for all and to provide the numerous unbelievers with undeniable proof of ‘original invention’. The adversary, poor Adrian Jacob is dead after all.  No contest. They surely have the edge…again. Smarties anyone?

There is no doubt, in our opinion, that Adrian Jacob’s ideas, as with many others from Tolkien to Lewis to Umberto Eco ( seemingly) were added to the soup called Harry Potter to camouflage the original recipe and origins of the story that first came …. wait for it…. from no less a place than the Troubles of Northern Ireland.

It is as if all ideas belong to Rowling and her entourage and, of course, the law with its fuzzy, pedestrian, loose-ended and abstract rulings on what constitutes plagiarism and what does not, supports her all the way. Ah the law, where would criminals be without it? Dickens, who spent many hours in court as a journalist covering proceedings, said it neatly in The Pickwick Papers, “the law is a ass!”. In the red corner- the liars, with clever attorneys exuding the kind of professional gravitas that only money and lots of it can bestow. In the blue, the truthsayers, nervous, uncertain, in foreign waters, hoping they and their families are not driven onto the soup queue on a ‘technicality’ which seem to be as ubiquitous as eggs to foxes. “May the best man win and remember we want a clean fight. No thumbs in the eyes and no low punches. In the event of a draw, the referee’s verdict is final!  To your corners and come out fighting.” And what’s it all about? A children’s book; or rather,  a rapid series of them, all meticulously engineered, penned and researched by one brain… or so we are to believe. Not so much the books it has to be said. But the dough, truckloads of it, enough to make Ronnie Biggs Slytherin-green with envy. Rowling was nobody until she started minting it.

One can just imagine Little and his Cabbala of hacks sifting through books into the wee hours searching for characters and emotive storylines; or perhaps stuck in front of the office tele watching videos like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Wizard of Oz and whatever else is sure to titillate the successfully beguiled young by way of novelty. Plagiarism? May we choke on our Smarties! It is ‘borrowings,’ ‘variations’, ’similar to’s’, ’previous models and paradigms,’ ‘established folklore, genres and traditions’. Not, “hey! that’s somebody else’s work for chrissakes! somebody else’s spiritual property, somebody else’s LIFE! We have no right!” Never that. It’s more likely: “Freeze! No! Go back a bit! That’s it! Pens at the ready. Go!” Or were they too clever to get involved, disciplined enough perhaps to wrap up the tentacles of their voraciously inspired minds despite private pretensions to literary concert skills? Let us say, even if nobody else will, that there are serious stylistic variations in Rowling’s ‘outpourings’ that only a fool could miss. But there seems to be an endless supply of fools around, too desperately in need of losing themselves to distraction, to notice their pockets being picked.

In fact, (and there is no doubt whatever about this  in our camp) the original story comes from one of us, would you believe?…..William, our press officer and elder of our group. 

Oops! You can leave now if you wish.

Many have, which is why we are left to trumpet our cause alone and step up for freedom of speech, lately referred to by Obama in relation to the crooked Iranian elections. Freedom of speech? What is that when we are all at home? Fear not. These days alas, it is just a principle , an unworkable abstraction by all appearances, a shadow of his former self, weakened by self-doubt, cowering in dark places, afraid to show his face in case he is recognised. Go forth young writer and give it a go and we will see you in the dole queue just as surely as these words labour onto this page in the hope of finding an honest mind to kindle them into meaning. “Unfounded, unsubstantiated and untrue” said the Bloomsbury man. Freedom of speech? Soon we will not be able to talk about our wives unless we carry the marriage certificate in our pockets. An actor will surely not have long to wait before he can sue a critic because of a bad review and a footballer his club for being left on the bench. What a defamation of character is there! Will known gangsters be entitled to sue for libel  if they are not voted into the council’s chambers? We can rest assured that there will be many ‘legal’ firms waiting in the wings to champion their rights at the expense of  yours…. for a percentage of the ‘take’, of course. “The law is a ass!” For sure. To participate in the judicial operetta incidentally, you have to swear on a book – the Bible – all about a Chap, for Whom the concrete evidence that He even existed, is  as commensurate with that for flying saucers in Peru; yet for that reason ten times more convincing to those who have progressed beyond the delusion of ‘human justice”.  We ramble in the discourse, but hang in there because there is something you might learn as you go on.

We had, even then, way back in 1990 been working with disadvantaged youngsters in riot-torn Derry. William’s book is owed in part to work he did during that period with his brother Tom, and moreso, to his having to bring up his son in incredible and very trying circumstances. That was in the period before we formed The Bogside Artists and long before we began to paint our first mural – The Gasmask Mural that became famous overnight. Yea, I know, another neglected genius crying in the wilderness, yet another claimant to join the long procession of the ‘plagiarised’ who bay nightly at the moon for one half of Rowling’s kingdom. Jacob, thy name is legion. But, not this time folks. Rowling is welcome to her spoils. William couldn’t care less, nor could we. Truth however, is worth standing up for, once in a while.

The current hullabaloo about the Adrian Jacob fiasco currently unfolding is due to the fact that there are lawyers involved who are prepared to bring a case against the publisher (Bloomsbury) and fight for the posthumous rights of the author. The basis of their suit – a 36 page booklet that was allegedly sent to Little. Big mistake. Will made the same mistake, incidentally. “There is no money in children’s books”, Little wrote back to inform him.” Yea right. Will didn’t believe him for a second even then, because he  knew what his story was about, where it came from and what it meant. He is a whole lot less inclined to believe him now.

Jacob’s legal team may even know what they are up against. William, on the other hand, the author of Travels with Li Po, cannot afford such a luxury any more than we can provide him with it; but our website provides overwhelming factual evidence that demands serious attention from anybody really interested in where it all began. Timing is all in literature. You had to have been there…in the pre-Harry Potter world. The book was a response to the times and the needs of those times. End of story. To Will, Rowling is like one of Little’s scribblers, exploiting a story that was hatched by a solitary Indian scribe shortly after the battle of the Little Big Horn and written on the plains where the massacre took place.

Harry Potter did not and could not have had his origins in a mere idea, be it on a train, in the shower, a flying saucer, or anywhere else, any more than Einstein’s famous equation popped into his head, all by itself, “fully formed”. Who among you was idiot enough to buy into that? Most everybody, it seems.

This notion was likely planted by others who were familiar enough with the original to give the quaint but profitable impression that the author was somehow ‘inspired’ and in tune both with her times and with all things magical. Just as they called the author J.K Rowling rather than Joanna Rowling to give the impression that the source was male and not female. Bloomsbury has actually stated this, incredibly. Now, why would they do that? Because, explained Bloomsbury, kids would not accept that a woman author would be sufficiently informed about male children as to be acceptable to them, or words to that effect. Is this an acceptable ruse, do you think? Sound economical prudence? Standard professional marketing? Or a straightforward con? Place your bets. Where are the unethical practices people when you need them? One thing is for sure, we, at any rate, will not  be falling over ourselves to buy a used-car from Bloomsbury.

So the glorious myth began. Saint Rowling was born, struggling to make ends meet, a lone parent traipsing through the streets of an indifferent metropolis, a waif in the storm, just like Potter. For how long? The gods were whispering in her ear and the muses danced around her bed at night. The inspired one, working at breakneck speed from the word go, took almost seven years to bring her vision to print, let it be noted, from the moment 0f her Damascus Road experience…. in a train of all places, but most suitably and quite inevitably… if Jacob is to be believed. Rossini and Bob Dylan eat your hearts out! She was being channeled, a ch0sen medium of ideas, or, at any rate, crafted as such for public consumption. She begins writing the guts of the entire series of seven books on the remote possibility that some day, wishing upon a star, over the rainbow, maybe, just maybe if the Muses could just manage to mysteriously guide her to a benign guardian of the literary world like Christopher Little, maybe…. just maybe,  one of them might be published. Providing Will of course didn’t succeed in getting his published first and especially book two of his series where his intrepid hero arrives at the College for Sorcerers where he was headed from the start as anyone with half a brain could easily tell from Book One. Did Rowling  have some assurance that she was home and dry if he failed? Did she already know that he had already failed by reason of a contract he had been duped into signing with another publisher who had no intention of publishing his work? And who could have provided her with that assurance? We speculate… but we are free to do so? Aren’t we? One thing is for sure, Will knew, even better than she what a mountain he would have to scale if he was ever to get his story into print. But it was his story, small consolation in retrospect, but an honourable certainty for all that. The participants in this con are out there. They know who they are. How wonderful for the human race if even one of them were to step up!

The truth is, the essential story, with all its spiritual ramifications, began here, in Derry where, throughout the eighties and nineties, matters of ultimate concern afflicted young and old alike and where death, violence and madness roamed the streets. That’s where the original story came from – riot-torn, grief-filled Derry … where Seamus Heaney, John Hume and Brian Friel come from. A city, no stranger at all to literary merit. A city, no stranger to suffering. Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Nah. Impossible! Fact is, something good always came out of Derry and always will. Derry people know a thing about freedom … and helluva lot more about civil rights than most.

And why, may we ask? should there be any doubt about Rowling’s authorship to begin with? Do we all have misgivings that Ian Fleming created James Bond or that Twain created Tom Sawyer? Is it axiomatic that an author’s legitimate purchase on his/her own creation be called into question right from the very start as it was with Rowling? Why should there be suspicions at all about her in the first place? Isn’t a woman, any woman, perfectly capable of inventing a successful fictional character just as Agatha Christie invented Poirot or Emily Brontë Catherine or Heathcliff? Are the highly successful Maeve Binchy and Jackie Collins also suspect? It is because, her claim that she stumbled upon an idea merely just does not ring true and indeed insults us in all our abject, defenseless gullibility. Our instincts have all the wisdom and our collective Unconscious has all the Truth. That’s why the hat never really felt comfortable with any of you. Nothing fits. You feel it and you know it.

Like Beethoven’s Eroica, the real story issues directly from a particular turbulent period in history and from a writer’s soul, mind, life and Spirit as he lived through that time. We know. We were there.

Moreover, and this is the clincher… so please listen carefully… William sent his book to Amnesty International in London where Rowling was working at the time and entered into a correspondence with her concerning the manuscript of Travels with Li Po that he had submitted for consideration to that august institution! He wrote copiously in longhand at her request and explained his story in great depth, where it came from, what it meant and its roots in Jungian philosophy and Greek mythology. Rowling eventually told him that Amnesty would not be publishing the book but enclosed the address of a person in Edinburgh who might be interested.

You are free to believe this or believe it not. You may think it a load of codswallop or it may trigger a deeper response. Whatever you think or choose to think, the fact is Will knows as do we.  And that is the difference. Rowling  has since denied ever having heard of Mr. Kelly or his book. A paltry aside for sure is this simple fact that has left newspaper editors scratching their heads in befuddlement until all their favourite prejudices against cranks, and Irish cranks especially, decide the issue for them. What else can Rowling do? Ask yourself. This is not about truth after all which seemingly has nothing to do with the law at all.

Hence the general indifference to William and his book. Nothing human about any of it. ‘Economic Prudence ‘you may still call it. Legal Strategy’ even. Clothe it in whatever fine threads you will, cover  it with perfume from the Orient or pearls from Japan, surround it with Christmas lights…..still, it all comes down to one thing  these people are avoiding scrutiny at all costs and have been doing so for years!

That alone explains all the ducking and diving , the overt and excessive protection of their charge by Little and his merry band of litigating moles; not to mention the vetoing of journalists’ articles that look like they might get within a mile of the truth. This we can vouch for from our own experience. Now, that’s better. Now you know at last that something is rotten in the state of Denmark and that your instincts did not deceive you after all.

The fact that Will has kept quiet about this for so long is simply because of direct legal intimidation from Blair, lawyer and partner to Rowling’s publishing agent, the mercurial, self-effacing Christopher Little. But now, that Jacob’s people have let the cat out of the bag, and indeed may well have a case of sorts, he is telling it like it is for once, whatever the consequences. That is because he has a mandate from us and our support. After all, what can Rowling’s legal hounds do to us that those who have a stranglehold on the tourism here in the city of Derry have not been doing to us for years and with very likely the same motive? Money, in a word. They haven’t succeeded in their aim. Neither will Rowling’s gang because, when all is said and done, with or without evidence, the TRUTH like the wind follows us all to both heaven and hell nomatter what we may think about It. What they can do is dumb it all down as best they can, as they have been doing. King Canute springs to mind, he who commanded the tides of the sea to recede simply because he was the king who must always was obeyed. It didn’t work for him and it won’t work for them, he had all the law courts on his payroll to boot. Indeed, all he got out of it was very wet and… very religious.

No legal proceedings have been launched against The Bogside Artists and Travels with Li Po has been available on our website for well over a year! And we know they are aware of it. They wrote to tell us as much.

Small fry who appear to infringe Rowling’s rights are jumped all over by Rowling’s legal conscripts  and invariably power-gripped into humiliating defeat … and yet here are we, flogging virtually the same story in full view of everybody and not a thing done about it. Why not? Surely we are a mere formality to the likes of Schillings and Co., at this stage, those well practised legal pugilists by now, veterans of many bouts? Is it because they are too soft-hearted to wave their fists at a charity existing on a shoestring? Would be bad for publicity to be sure. What would the neighbours think? Especially all those neighbours with kids who feel obligated to shell out for the latest edition of HP facing his exciting demons yet again. But…. business is business after all and if you don’t pay the rent out you go. Isn’t that what we all believe in and what many of us live and die for? The status quo of which Harold Potter is more than just a pillar. He is John Bull Junior on a broom.  ’The Bogside Artists are not worth bothering with,’  say the high and mighty and that folks is what they want you to believe. And many of you, even those of you who have intrepidly read this far are only too ready to agree with them. The truth is, we are their worst nightmare. And you can easily find out the reason why for yourself via the link at the bottom of this article.

That is why they demand to see any articles journalists may aspire to write about ”…Li Po; ( they have done this already with the Irish Examiner for instance who looked like covering the story until they made the mistake of contacting Schillings first), intimating that they will launch a defamation suit against William on whatever half-baked grounds they can dig up in a bid to gag us all for keeps, discredit our names, and ruin our reputations; but none of this is going to work, because, quite frankly, we couldn’t care less. And we may freely speculate too that  the Examiner like the Guardian very possibly got the old, tried and trusted magical  ’legal’ rune of ….”unfounded, unsubstantiated and untrue.“ It has a certain ring to it we do declare,…  reminiscent of the metal rings by which  a prisoner’s ankles are pinioned to render him immobile.

We believe ardently in freedom of speech and take leave to express our views here on the strength of that alone and we certainly will never budge from our shared conviction that anyone who strives to shut up their fellow writers and deprive them of the one thing that keeps them all going viz, freedom of expression, has no entitlement to the name of “writer”. The great Alexander Solzhenitsyn, to name but one, paid for that right by languishing in the Gulag camp over many years and fought for the artists’ right to creative freedom every day thereafter and for the rest of his life. He knew what it was to be pinioned in every sense of that word. It didn’t work.

Whatever Harry Potter may be about therefore, he is not about literature. He is about money, wealth, power, recognition. We three have been there and done that, apart from the wealth that is, and we can assure you, what we found wasn’t worth having. And if you think, like Rowling’s agent Little, that money is what writing for children is all about you need to take a stroll through the nearest cemetery, if your legs have strength enough, and re-examine your beliefs, preferably over a child’s headstone. Culture wasn’t put together by people fixated on the honey-pot. It was put together by men and women who loved the craft they were involved in, first and foremost. And the history of all cultures is littered with the corpses of people who paid the ultimate price for that devotion and the honest state of mind that informs it. Art too has its martyrs and saints, from Rembrandt to Gauguin, from Botticelli to Van Gogh, from Mozart to Bizet;  and the deliberate postioning, or attempts to do so, of Rowling in that sacred pantheon is offensive to many including us and very especially to Will who created the original story. We would also say the same to the trustees of Adrian Jacob’s estate incidentally who are diligently suing for hundreds of millions.

For Will, writing is, and always has been, about shining a little light into the human drama in a way that entertains. That’s all. And if he occasionally laments ever having put pen to paper to bring into existence his wonderful little book Travels with Li Po, he still believes in the sacred calling and purpose of art in all its forms, as do we, who have spent many long hours and undergone much grief putting together our gallery of murals. Why? Because it meant something to us that far transcends the glittering commodities and transient services that money alone can supply. Enough said. We leave you, with the only link you need, to find out for yourself what is and what is not, what is true and what is false.

You can check out all about Will’s book from this link;

As far as we are concerned, for Potterites et al, the broom stops right there

We have launched our new websites recently. Upgraded you could say but streamlined for easy reading. Visitors can subscribe to our blog there as well. That way we can keep people posted as to what is happening at the studio and the state of affairs in Derry. Also on the websites are specific directions to finding us and we have taken leave to draw attention to our very popular presentations on our work. These brief talks are tailor-made for tourists who want to investigate The People’s Gallery by themselves and need some information as to what the murals are about. Art students of course are thrilled to learn about the actual painting of the murals. We explain all by very rare footage and slides. They also get to see our magnificent gallery. Admission to the studio is free and booking is very easy via the websites or by phoning the studio. This information can be printed out from the tours site :http://www.freederrymurals.com.