This is not what I elected to make myself expert in. For a while I relied on people who did choose to hone their expertise in current events, but then I stopped. Give me Thomas More. Give me the Reformation. Give me the historical role of gender. Give me wars. Give me coups. I will throw down with you: on these matters I have a living, evolving, deeply informed opinion. But this other stuff? I can’t hack it. It makes me cry.

I know what I feel about Israel. It’s extremely, extremely complicated. I won’t step on the mat with it; I shut down when the conversation starts. This isn’t only emotional. I’m emotional about a lot of things, not all of them historical or political. They don’t make me cry in a way that stops me articulating myself. My feelings about Israel are an amorphous blob in my chest. For arguably the first time I can’t bend words to my feelings; I can’t make words work.

What’s up with that? Everyone has an opinion about this; everyone talks about it. I feel strongly about it but can’t - won’t? - talk about it. In happier moments I believe I won’t have the conversation because I don’t want to open my mouth about something it’s almost impossible to know enough about. When I talk about the historical role of gender, for example - something I feel very strongly about - I am ready with defences, with fourteen layers of argument and rebuttal. I don’t have to prepare. I’m ready with the rhetoric. I’m ready to go to.

But there’s also this: I’m ready to have my mind changed. I’m ready to respect my opponent.

With something like Israel, there’s no one I can trust. Try to find objectivity on this subject. Try to wade through the politicking and the self-serving bullshit on both sides. Wade through that for truth. You won’t find it. There is no opponent or proponent to respect here. And I won’t have my mind changed. So I don’t talk.

How my mind is made up doesn’t matter. Even if it did, I couldn’t articulate it. I’m horrified by those I disagree with, and by those I agree with. I’m horrified at all of it.

Is it safer to confine my expertise to the world before the 1832 Reform Act? You might think so; I don’t. But I think it’s what I’ve got; it’s what I’m talking about; it’s what I’m willing to talk about. This I don’t talk about. Read this entry again. I didn’t talk about it.

Till next time &c &c.

© 2008 Sarah Eve Kelly | All rights reserved. This post cannot be republished without express written permission.

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That was my dad, back in 1990. I was in the sixth grade. We didn’t have much beyond Peasant Vision on TV in those days, but inasmuch as we gathered round that window to the outside world, it was to watch two shows: CBC’s The Fifth Estate (which I largely ignored) and Law & Order (which I was infatuated with).

My dad doesn’t often make pronouncements about things. I’ve gotten three (beyond this one) that I can remember vividly: that Mahler’s Fifth Symphony must be listened to whilst lying down; that I should feel free to judge people based on whether or not they liked The Lion in Winter starring Katharine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole, and that I was going to play the clarinet, whether I liked it or not. So when he piped up about Michael Moriarty, I listened.

Last week I found out that Law & Order had gotten the axe from NBC after a twenty-year run, and last night I watched the series finale. What an innocuous finale it was. I didn’t feel like the 27th Precinct or the Manhattan District Attorney’s office was shutting down so much as I felt that my window on it was closing. There was nothing to cry about in the episode, not really. But when my media player shut down and all I had left was my computer, I sort of felt like someone had taken my house away.

Twenty years. That beats a lot of things. It outruns my relationship with my husband by eight years. It outruns the longest stretch of time I’ve lived in a single dwelling by fifteen years. It might have been the last thing my parents had in common. That show is older than three of my cousins, one of my sisters, and two of my nephews. In a very backwards, twisty, oblique way, it represented a stability that I’ve been consistently unable to manufacture for myself. Every week, a new episode of Law & Order. And now: Law & Order: Los Angeles? LOLA? QTF, man?

The cast of this show was managed sort of like a hockey team: infamous Oilers ex-head coach Craig MacTavish said that any good team needed a ‘churn’ if it was going to remain supple and strong. It’s interesting that 1990 is when Law & Order began, and is also the last year that the Oilers won the Stanley Cup. The churn worked beautifully for the former, and more or less disastrously for the latter.

I felt betrayed when Claire Kincaid left (I was fifteen; I believed in love and justice). I felt betrayed when Ben Stone left, for that matter, though my love for Sam Waterston is unconditional. I cried when Adam’s wife died. Of course, casting mistakes were made (I shall not name names, but there were dark years). But this was a solid show with a solid formula that consistently attracted serious talent. And watching it disappear into the ether of cancelled shows is much sadder than, say, The Simpsons being cancelled (seriously: ninety per cent of their best episodes were in the first nine seasons; there I said it). There were only moments on this show when one thought: have they done all they can do? Because then they did something else, and did it better.

I thought the twentieth season had a stronger cast than the show had seen in years. (Lupo is the most compelling detective that show has seen since Mike Logan, and you heard it here first. Maybe.) It never occurred to me that this might be the last. As someone recently said, sure, Sam Waterston has his Ameritrade ads, his TD ads, but how are his eyebrows going to find work now?

I’m sure NBC had its reasons. But this show followed me from BC to Alberta and back and back again; it followed me to London and Cambridge and back again; when I tell you I was more or less flat-chested when the show started, maybe you’ll get an idea of how important this show has been in my life. So I’m here to apologise if I took it for granted. And for the love of Christ, television, please don’t cancel anything else without consulting me first. I’m not sure if my psyche can handle it.

Till next time, &c &c.

© 2008 Sarah Eve Kelly | All rights reserved. This post cannot be republished without express written permission.

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All the same!

The beautiful and talented Andy Grabia, who can summarise Tolkien in evening dress or in a bathing costume (if you’d prefer), has tagged me to create a list of things I want to do this summer. Things, mind, that don’t have anything to do with what I’d do anyway, like killing zombies or reading about communities of credit, but things that involve much shouting of carpe diem and the like, things that make you appreciate what’s around you in a way that (hopefully) isn’t overbearing or smug. And I couldn’t ever be accused of being smug - except when my brother’s around - so. This I will try. These are not resolutions in the sense of ‘I shall brush my teeth for two full minutes,’ so I’m going to slap myself if that’s what it starts to devolve into.

The summer of 2010 C.E. shall involve the following:

• spending at least the greater portion of every single sunny English day outside, even if it’s just out on the pub patio with my work;
• at least one punting expotition through Cambridge, and preferably two or many more, as I’d like to do one upriver around the colleges and one downriver to Grantchester;
• writing something every single day, and hopefully finishing my novel (sigh);
• taking a chance on at least two plays (and as such saving my pennies to do so);
• celebrating fair summer evenings in good company with a tipple or two of something;
• getting off the rail of London-Cambridge-London-Cambridge at least once so I can get out into the country and see the sky;
• getting out to New York again at least once;
• running out of breath as often as possible for all the right reasons;
• eating a lot of cold, fresh food;
• swimming;
• reading at least five novels or collections of short stories;
• doing whatever it is I need to do to feel sanguine and confident about the upcoming academic year.

That’s it from me - for now. What about you? What would make a perfect summer for you this year?

© 2008 Sarah Eve Kelly | All rights reserved. This post cannot be republished without express written permission.

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What you had planned will not do. If you pursue your present course, the book will explode or collapse, and you do not know about it yet, quite. … You notice only this: your worker - your one and only, your prized, coddled, and driven workers - is not going out on that job. Will not budge, not even for you, boss. Has been at it long enough to know when the air smells wrong; can sense a tremor through boot soles. … What do you do? Acknowledge, first, that you cannot do nothing. Lay out the structure you already have, x-ray it for a hairline fracture, find it, and think about it for a week or a year; solve the insoluble problem. Or subject the next part, the part at which the worker balks, to harsh tests. It harbors an unexamined and wrong premise. Something completely necessary is false or fatal. Once you find it, and if you can accept the finding, of course it will mean starting again. This is why many experienced writers urge young men and women to learn a useful trade.

I was heartened by the bit about ‘a week or a year’. I’m a slow writer. There are as many schools of thought on writing speed and process as there are writers; I was reading Stephen King’s memoir yesterday and he thinks that a modest beginner’s goal is 1,000 words a day. I know many people who agree with him. I think: you do what you do. You figure out what works. And what seems to work for me is proceeding very slowly.

In any case, I’ve now completed Annie Dillard’s exercise, and she’s not wrong. There’s the hairline fracture, right there, threatening to spread clear across the windshield. It was a question of something has to go. There was too much in the manuscript, and too little as well. I’m reminded of my mother’s adage: if you have a thousand dollars, do you give a thousand dollars to one charity or a dollar to a thousand charities? I have a hundred thousand words, and a dollar ain’t much. Writing should be like writing, not like juggling. (Although part of it is, of course, juggling.)

I’ve decided on the load-bearing pillar that has to go, and it hurts. A lot. Not only for the flexing of fingers and lifting of storylines and killing of scenes and starting again that will have to happen, but because that pillar was one of my darlings. I’m going to be brave. I’m going to kill it.

Till next time, &c &c.

© 2008 Sarah Eve Kelly | All rights reserved. This post cannot be republished without express written permission.

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Two days ago an agent received a bad query. A bad, arrogant, douchey query. You know how I know? Because this agent broadcasted it all over the web - not just the content of the query, but the bad, arrogant, douchey, unprofessional response said agent received when the author was confronted with her form rejection. And not only that, but the author’s name.

It is an occupational hazard of following agents on Twitter to see a lot of bad query snippets posted as object lessons in what not to do when you’re querying. And I have a lot of respect for setting strict submission guidelines and refusing to consider queries that don’t abide by them. I appreciate that agents try to teach writers lessons by telling them what not to do - and, more importantly, what to do to query well. But this particular case was not a lesson: it taught nothing. It was bullying and schoolyard antics at their viral worst.

Lashon hara is the Jewish prohibition against ‘talebearing’ or gossip. It is specifically targeted against the use of ‘true speech for wrongful purpose’. It’s right up there with murder and incest as an unforgivable sin against another human being. Lashon hara is aptly demonstrated by a 19th-century homily which gained worldwide fame in the 2008 film Doubt. The story goes like this: a man feels badly for having spread gossip, and consults his rabbi regarding how to make amends. The rabbi says, ‘Go to the roof of that building with a pillow and tear it apart, and let the feathers fly away.’ The man does this, and returns to the rabbi: ‘What do I do now?’ The rabbi says, ‘Now, go gather up all those feathers.’ It is as possible to rein back malicious gossip as it is to find every feather that was once in that pillow. It is, in a word, irreversible.

There is a specific exemption to the prohibition against lashon hara: the promulgation of true speech for a necessary purpose. As a warning, as a lesson. Airing out this query may have come within the outer boundaries of this exemption if it hadn’t devolved into a poetry contest mocking the author’s website, writing, and putative choice of underpants. People who query arrogantly are not, as a rule, arrogant people: they are usually desperately insecure people who shouldn’t be put in the stocks and subjected to public ridicule for an arrogant query. It is not only mean and bullying to no purpose whatsoever: it is dangerous. And at the very least, it is colossally unprofessional.

Who has gained from this? No one. To what purpose was it put? Yes, the query was bad, but what followed was like going after a squirrel with an AK-47. No one has gained, and this author has irretrievably lost, and for what? For one unsound move. You might say he was asking for it. The worst he was asking for was a sobering smackdown over email if the agent felt so strongly about his rudeness, not a kangaroo court.

Form rejections have one purpose: to save the agent’s very valuable time. When you get a form rejection, that’s it: no further correspondence required. This author thought he knew better, and responded. Bad move. But if there’s anything I’ve learned from my own dealings with agents - and with human beings, for that matter - it’s that usually, the best way to make a bad thing go away is to ignore it. This agent didn’t do that; this agent started a public circus. She certainly didn’t save herself any time.

Writers are constantly opining about that one writer who gives all writers a bad name. I saw a lot of that yesterday on Twitter and in the comments on the agent’s website: ‘Don’t judge all writers by that guy!’ ‘Don’t judge all Canadians by that guy!’ What about agents who give agents a bad name? To what standard are they meant to be held? How can an agent justify spending an entire business day hosting a poetry contest about this guy’s skivvies?

Readers, there are people who have resorted to self-harm and suicide because of a lot less than this guy’s been put through. Stable people; balanced people. And are writers, as a population, stable and balanced? Well, I’ll let you answer that.

That’s it for today. Back to high good humour soon.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

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