Way back in 2005 Sir Terry Pratchett observed the following in a letter concerning a BBC interview with Rowling which he considered suspect;

“And then there’s my question. Why didn’t the interviewer ask it? Here’s the world’s best-selling fantasy writer who has just said she hadn’t thought she was writing fantasy and also that she doesn’t really like the stuff. She goes on to say that she didn’t finish TLOTR or the Narnia series and has issues with Lewis. No problem there, but all this revelatory stuff just floated past, apparently unexamined. I’d like to know how an author can write in a genre she doesn’t like– really. I’d like to know what she thinks she *is* writing. “ (Terry Pratchett Published August 2, 2005.)  Sir Terence Pratchett is an extremely successful fantasy fiction writer.

NB; Without having heard of Pratchett we ourselves made exactly the same observation that you will find in one or several posts on this blog.

Pratchett who suffers from Alzheimer’s was royally pilloried for his intelligence. Pilloried let it be said from two sources – Rowling’s Private Army of bloggers and the establishment that, representing bourgeois interests in the publishing and media industries protect their ‘golden cow’ with a viciousness that would put the three-headed Cerberus to shame. Nobody of any note, to our knowledge, came out in Pratchett’s defense. (http://www.sfsignal.com). They attacked the man and ignored what he had said by means of what we have christened the “BLOGASMEAR”. (The blogasmear is a blog comment whose singular purpose is to discredit the commentator and his usually rational argument by discrediting him as a person. The devil’s work in other words.)  He was ‘jealous’. It was a case of “sour grapes”. And so on. Some of these were pitched in by the usual congregation of the Potter-Gullible who figure success is the only criterion of worth; and, of course, by the juvenile fantasists who have been told by Rowling-Little in so many words - “All you need my child is a good idea to come into your head, a pen and a jotter, and abracadabra! off you go to the land of wealth unimaginable.”  You have to pity parents who have to talk their kids out of this nonsense as much as you have to pity anyone who has bought into it.

Sadly, Pratchett like so many others has accepted much of the other drivel put out by Rowling’s PR men or he would have taken his observation to its logical conclusion viz; reason has clearly established that this woman Rowling is telling lies. Why would she do that? If she has told lies about her ignorance of what genre she was writing in, a lie that insults anyone with an IQ of three or under, just how many other lies has she told? Did she even write the stuff all by herself? And finally; …. where the hell did she steal it all from? Or how about…. Who is in it with her? Her pet hate is bigotry she informs us, to give one little instance, but that devoutly held principle clearly did not stop her insisting that nobody who was not a Brit was to work on her films. Indeed contradictions abound in Rowling’s remarks even those she scripted all by herself that make Pratchett’s sane remark wilt like a rose in methane by comparison. There are answers to all of these questions in existence if you are brave enough to step out of the ranks of the iconolaters to find them… and many of them are answered right here. Fans of Pratchett should at least give that author the respect of listening to him because his question remains hanging in the clouds for all to see.

Pratchett seems to have had about as much affect on the sane wing of British journalism as Moses had on the revelers cavorting around the Golden Calf. What deliberately obscures the whole issue of course is the belated doctrine of precedents that has been used by Rowling’s army to smokescreen the real issue – Plagiarism. “Belated’ is the key word in that sentence. Why prattle about precedents now? Why not way back then, say around book Two? Might it have something to do with the Willy The Wizard case that currently seeks a hearing in the High Court? 

Those who support plagiarism on principle would find it intolerable in practice if it happened to them that is; that’s if any of them was even capable of producing something good enough to be filched. None of them are although most of them we may assume believe they are. Or are they really so magnanimous in their views that they would happily send a congratulatory note to the burglar who ransacked their house commending him on his skill and knowledge of locks and praising his profound knowledge of lock precedents? Incredibly, among their ranks you will find respected journalists to whose deluded brains both Pratchett’s comments and our own have failed to gain admittance. Meanwhile, the great authoress who wrote diddly-squat prior to her magical visitation by an ‘idea’ if you please (indeed the first volume of Potter is a blatant attempt to present the hero as a mere ‘idea”), has her private army of bloggers to keep her safe from all menacing scrutiny. They have their lairs all over the net where they invite comments in order to filter out the enemies of Rowling-Little. Interpol has become Interpotter whose mission it is to hoodwink the public and protect Rowling from scrutiny by the use of fallacious argument, misinformation and downright lies. These manipulated idiots, paid and unpaid, have no problem coming out to bat for Rowling,… for Queen and Country? or have they simply sold their souls? Place your bets.

The Bogside Artists in any case will go on telling it as it is as we have been doing in paint and word for many years in dedicated protection of the one right that alone matters to any artist worth his or her salt…..FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Long may it be kept safe from the likes of Rowling-Little-Blair-Schillings et al.

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. 

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.”