Syntagma Media is to sponsor the new Stratford International Festival of Literature in Shakespeare’s Stratford on Avon, England, next year.

The Festival organizer, Steve Newman, is aiming to create a cultural phenomenon along the lines of the Cheltenham and Hay-on-Wye literary bashes, which attract people like Bill Clinton, Martin Amis and others.

The event will be held over a long weekend next autumn / fall and will be sponsored by Humdrumming Ltd in addition to ourselves.

If you fancy coming, we’ll keep you informed of plans and booking arrangments. Join the mailing list by shooting an email to info(at)SyntagmaMedia(dot)com.

The Nirvaneans is my new book, due for publication by Humdrumming on June 21 next year. Here’s a little taster from the preface :

The basic premise of this book is that “Nirvanic experience” is more common than we might suppose, but often goes unrecognized. Moreover, it is not an abnormal event, but a sudden emergence of our subtle background consciousness: our Nirvanoception.

An American study showed that a majority of people claimed to have had spiritual experiences, but that a significant number did not want to repeat them. Even a glimpse of our real self-nature overturns every canon of the materialist world-view, and that can be deeply challenging to some.

Reality is clearly multi-layered, at least in texture. Quantum physics recognized the fact when it postulated an infinite number of dimensions in its mathematical equations. The danger of this particular approach, though, is that the further we stray from direct experience, the less our speculations are worth in any practical sense. Many of our religious woes are caused by the misconstrual of texts which sought to hide the secrets of our nature from the uninitiated. A simple adherence to phenomenology would make a difference to our understanding of many of the inscrutable mysteries of life.

Alan Watts once wrote : “It is especially important for Westerners to understand that high lamas, Zen masters, and Hindu gurus…are human beings, not supermen. We must not put them, as we have put Jesus Christ, on pedestals of reverence so high that we automatically exclude ourselves from their state of consciousness.”

I have set out here to describe the state of Nirvana—including detailed, attested descriptions of it—and the radical implications of its realization for the realizer. The process is mostly misunderstood in the West and is practically ignored in the East, where it originated in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. An extraordinary spin-off is that it delivers powerful confirmation of the survival of consciousness after death. It also gives us invaluable clues to the mystery of the Holy Grail and the wonders of the Philosophers’ Stone.

John M Evans

After all the publicity effort over the launch of Denys Val Baker’s: The Sea’s in the Kitchen, I hope to have news of the results soon.

The new Denys Val Baker is now on the streets, so lots to celebrate for Humdrumming after all their work.

Congratulations to the team and to Martin Val Baker in Penzance.

You can buy a copy of the book by clicking in the link in the sidebar.

As a final throw in our Denys Val Baker Week, here are a few more snippets from his irresistible first autobiographical volume, The Sea’s in the Kitchen. This is the opening to the book:

Author’s Note
“After working for many years in London as a professional author and
editor I responded to a call which many writers and artists have felt and
went to settle ‘away from it all ‘ in Cornwall. As this autobiographical
account of the ensuing ten years will show, life cannot be escaped from
in Cornwall any more than anywhere else. But in fact Cornwall offers
many precious things to the creative worker, quite apart from its inspiring
natural background - not least a more sympathetic and tolerant attitude
than is generally found in provincial England. For this reason I have tried
in this book to capture a portrait of Cornwall in our life as much as of our
life in Cornwall.”

Chapter One
“When Jess and I were married it seemed perfectly natural to me that we
should settle down in Cornwall. But then perhaps I was a little prejudiced,
for I had long ago deserted the literary world of London for the wilder
and much more exciting world of Cornish cliffs and carns and moors,
and everywhere the booming echoes of the restless sea.

“Like many other professional authors before me l had made the welcome discovery that one of the writer’s most precious gifts is that of freedom of movement. I could, of course, have travelled farther a field, wandered the world, but the fact was I had for a long time been conscious of feeling drawn westwards to this strange and rather primitive and mysterious land of Celtic mythology. This may have been partly due to Celtic sympathy, as I am Welsh. Whatever the reasons I felt happy and satisfied in Cornwall, whether living in a tiny castle on the cliffs at Portquin or working with a repertory theatre at Camborne or writing novels in an attic bedroom looking over the serene beauty of the Carrack Broads at Falmouth. I could not, in fact, imagine living anywhere else, or how anyone could wish to live anywhere else.

“It was true that Jess and I met far from this magic land. At the time I was spending Christmas up in London and one evening my friend Ross said: ‘Do you remember I told you about a little Sagittarian with two small daughters who has a flat off the Fulham Road? Well, it’s only round the corner — come on, I’ll introduce you.’ ”

In 1948, following the break-up of his first marriage, Denys Val Baker moved to Cornwall where he rented a cottage on Trencrom Hill and it was from here that the first Cornish Reviews were published between 1949 and 1952.

The magazine ran for ten issues and offered the very best of Cornish writing on all aspects of the arts, including articles by Bernard Leach, R. Morton Nance, Peter Lanyon and A.K. Hamilton Jenkin as well as poetry by the young Causley, Clemo, W.S. Graham and the irrepressible Arthur Caddick, who penned this first volume’s swan song: ‘Its friends, the artists had no cash to spare, And those who should have helped it did not care’ — thus appraising the fate of many a brave literary venture.

Short Stories
Over the years, Denys Val Baker sustained his trade as a writer by producing hundreds of short stories, many of which were broadcast by the BBC. He was an acknowledged master of the genre, reminiscent in his more literary creations of H.E. Bates and Lawrence — The Woman and the Engine Driver and The Clay Pool being particularly fine examples — and it was a matter of some regret to himself that he had not more time to dedicate to his short story form, his favourite. But life and limb, not to mention a large and flourishing family from his second marriage, demanded a steady output of bread and butter writing in the form of stories, articles and lesser novels.

During the fifties, Val Baker lived in Penzance, Sennen Cove and St Hilary before moving to St Ives, which later inspired the first of his idiosyncratic autobiographies, The Sea’s in the Kitchen and The Door is Always Open.

There was to follow an inevitable sequence of twenty-four more such books by which Val Baker captivated an entirely new public, to whom he brought great pleasure through escapist reading. The books were extrovert and delightfully eccentric and it is by these that many will remember him.

His later adventures at sea in his converted Motor Fishing Vessel Sanu were outrageously chronicled in such books as The Petrified Mariner which, in their turn, were guaranteed to harrow the blood of any professional seaman with those tales of Denys’ and Sanu’s incredible brushes with disaster.

Although one guessed that there was more than enough of Valentine Baker’s pioneering instinct in his son to keep Sanu afloat and on course in the long term. (”…You mean you had the wrong charts Denys, and you headed up channel regardless…?” A quiet chuckle and that self effacing smile, followed by …Well, Sanu knew exactly where she was going…”).

You couldn’t make it up.

The following is an extract from the newly republished The Sea’s in the Kitchen by Denys Val Baker:

Denys’s house in Penzance.

” Each of us could produce our favourite version of Dennis Pattison and his cars. I think I like best the story told by Donald Swan, of how one lovely sunny day he was driving back from Bodmin and gave a lift to a young New Zealand doctor and his wife. Wishing to impress them with the delights of Cornwall, it was such a lovely day, Donald said: ‘Look, I’ll tell you what, I’ll drive over to Porthleven. A friend of mine has a bungalow on the cliffs there. We’ll have a nice lazy time…’

” However, when Donald drove up the narrow lane leading to Dennis Pattison’s house he found the way blocked by an old ex-Post Office van, and Dennis Pattison hovering nervously around. Apparently the car had been there for days blocking the way and now there was unrest among the neighbours. How fortunate that Donald should arrive - as it happened Dennis knew of a shed at the end of a field, a woman had told him it would be all right to put his van there. Could Donald possibly…?

” Aided by the New Zealand doctor, Donald turned his car around and hitched up the van and proceeded to tow it by a difficult route up a narrow winding hill and out of Porthleven until they reached a large white gate opening onto a field with a shed nearby. After much complicated manoeuvring they got the old van close to the shed and then went and opened the doors…”

Be one of the first to buy Denys’s book. There’s a link in the sidebar.

Denys Val Baker’s literary output was quite prodigious. Most people knew that he was a well established author but few appreciated the extent of his achievement.

In his lifetime, he published 14 novels, 26 autobiographies, 23 short story collections, 18 books on general subjects, 41 edited collections of other writer’s work and several hundred short stories.

He was a writer from the very start. Born in 1917 of Welsh parentage, his father was Valentine Baker the noted flight pioneer who taught Amy Johnson to fly. (Valentine Baker was later killed in a flying accident while testing a Martin-Baker Fighter in 1942. His partner, James Martin, went on to design the first ejector seat for jet-engined aircraft.)

Denys Val Baker began work as a junior reporter on several regional newspapers and worked briefly in Fleet Street where he learned many of the basic skills of the writer’s trade. On the outbreak of war he became a conscientious objector (he had been vegetarian since the mid-thirties and was to remain so until his death) and worked with various pacifist groups in London doing voluntary work during the blitz.

In 1941 he began editing Opus, a quarterly literary magazine and it was to this particular literary form that he dedicated much of his energy and skill over the coming years. There followed other editorial stints with Voices, Writing Today, Modern Short Stories and International Short Stories, all of which featured work by such developing writers as Alex Comfort, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Taylor, Rayner Heppenstall, William Sampson, Anais Nin, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Krishnamurti and Henry Miller.

First Novels, 1945 saw the publication of Worlds Without End, a collection of Val Baker’s own short stories followed soon after by his first novel, The White Rock, while the end of the forties saw two more novels, The Widening Mirror, and The More We Are Together, a humorous account of community life.

From Des Hannigan’s Obituary of Denys in Peninsula Voice, Penzance August 1984.

With Humdrumming’s republication of the works of Denys Val Baker, beginning with The Sea’s in the Kitchen, we’re having a Denys Val Baker Week here on Dial Publishing, so stay tuned for lots of information about the man, the writer, and the works.

Denys is rarely heard of nowadays, but if you ever come across one of his books, acquire, read and enjoy (see the sidebar). They are rib-ticklingly funny and an immensely good read.

Denys Val Baker (1917 - 1984), owner and editor of The Cornish Review, was the author of twenty hilarious autobiographies. Titles of these included, The Sea’s in the Kitchen and The Petrified Mariner, which give you a flavour of them. He wrote in the 1950s through the 70s, and was a full-time professional author, by which I mean he was always broke.

Nevertheless, he managed to buy an enormous old tramp steamer, MVS Sanu, and, with no sailing experience whatever, took his large brood of wild children and long-suffering wife, Jess, on incredibly dangerous voyages. He was on the rocks more times than Jack Daniels.

Denys lived in Penzance, Land’s End and St. Ives in Cornwall, and was usually seeking some means of financing his next outrageous project. He was an adventurer in the grand English tradition, though always amusingly shambolic.

You once could find his books on the shelves of most libraries, where they were among the most popular titles for borrowing. These days they’re not so easy to come by, although Amazon has a good listing of second-hand copies, mostly at premium prices. Denys would have been amazed.

His character never allowed a moment to pass without doing something absolutely beyond the pale. A catalogue of his adventures would take 20 books to compile, which is probably why he wrote 20 autobiographies.

When I lived in Penzance we occupied a house across the road from his, though he had been dead for a decade. I noticed there was no blue plaque on his house, which is a pity, though everyone remembered him in the library, where he did most of his research. His son, Martin, still runs a print business in the town, and his wildest daughter, Demelza, lives there too.

Denys was one of the old school of writers. He spent a lot of time in London, mostly in the literary pubs around Soho where he hung out with the likes of Dylan Thomas and other luminaries of the scribbling fraternity.

But his heart was in Cornwall, as was most of his written output. He will be best remembered for his twenty or so “funny books”. Gerald Durrell is probably the nearest comparison.

Let’s hope he will not be totally forgotten, especially in the county that inspired his best work.

Lee Thompson, who designed the cover shown above for Humdrumming, has some interesting things to say about book cover design:

Book covers these days have to fulfill a great many tasks, and this can result in a struggle over the author’s vision and the publisher’s bottom line. For most authors, the whole joy of writing comes from others reading and benefiting from the author’s words, and money is often secondary. If authors were only interested in money, most of them wouldn’t write!!

The dichotomy comes in that publishing houses are, at the end of the day, a business. A business that’s part of a £16bn ($30bn) industry in the UK, with lots of competition and a broad marketplace for potential sales. When you look at the business structure and costs behind printing, storage, distribution and promotions, each title needs to sell well not only to earn back the advance paid to authors but also to recoup the thousands (in many cases hundreds of thousands) spent on getting the book into stores. I think there are few authors out there who have a full appreciation of these processes and that can often lead to frustration on their part.

It’s an irrefutable fact that everyone “judges a book by its cover”. As much as we’d like to think the merits of the book will shine through, if the cover is appalling, the sales will reflect that. So on that business level, the cover has to stand out in a book store. Recent research (published in this week’s Bookseller magazine) has shown that most readers are becoming less and less influenced by general cover quotes, so the art has to be distinctive.

Read the rest of his piece at Celebrity at Work.