A Novel Idea

I’ve been immersed in researching two sub-cultures for my book.  One of these worlds is psychic mediumship.  The other is that of underground hip hop, specifically the Minnesota brand of b-boying and b-girling.  For most of the population here, it’s basically under the radar, almost invisible.  For those involved in it, both as members of tight-knit crews and of the wider community of hip hop/break dancers, it’s a way of life.

B-Girl Ti-en-T, B-Girl Sweety Pop, & "Popper" Amy Sackett

Practicing and perfecting moves is their reason to come together.  Celebrating mastery of the form at performances and in “battles,” when dancers compete as crews or one-to-one, is the primary reason to be.  Performances are jaw-dropping, gravity-defying, magical (as in, “How did she do that?”) at events like the annual B-Girl Be celebration of hip hop.

As Amy Sackett told her students one night when I was observing a lesson at the Zenon Dance Company, it’s a genre totally distinct from jazz or ballet or modern. “Sometimes it transcends human movement,” Amy said, as when a body moves in West Coast waving, looking as if it simply has no bones.

I put on a pair of brand new Puma Suedes yesterday, stopped at son Kai’s so that he could weave in extra-wide laces (b-boy/b-girl style), and took my place at the very back of a class of dancers, so that I could feel what my characters feel as they learn the moves.  My brain and my knees are such that I know I won’t be mimicking the Swedish grandmother who, reportedly, took up break dance only five years ago and is now doing head-spins.  I’d observed various classes for weeks, but putting together one combination after another on the dance floor was humbling and, I suspect, a source of humor for the others.

Nevertheless, I’ve moved beyond showing up in order to deconstruct a move or to determine if the words “fresh”  and “peace” are still part of the local lingo (and, yes, they are still in use).  I’m in love with the culture and philosophy of this underground phenomenon.  Forget bullets and bling.  Forget sexualized booty-dancing.

At a Poppin’ Battle at Central Mission in St. Paul two weeks ago, I witnessed amazing feats of physical prowess by freestyling b-girls and b-boys, facing off one-to-one with each other.  (And the operative word here is “with,’ not “against,” since the vibe is one of appreciation for what the other can do, the motive to respect but evolve the fundamental form into something uniquely and wondrously one’s own, and when that happens, for all to celebrate it.)  I intended to stay an hour and ended up staying all five until Sweety Pop — a b-girl with such presence I couldn’t help but think queen, as in Nefertiti or Cleopatra – and an experienced b-boy called Dizne, battled in the final round.

Finalist DeOnna Gray-Lige aka Sweety Pop

But here’s what else I watched:  dancers, after a turn in the freestyle circle, enveloped in hugs and love by their crews; the judges (accomplished veterans) joining the crowd during breaks to mentor and model moves; a heartwarming equality — dancers of every color and culture encouraging each other; bodies so attuned to the pulsing beat that they kept moving on the sidelines, in the foyer, to the beat of the spoken word of Truth Maze and Tou SaiK. Open-hearted, egalitarian, peace-loving… on and off the floor. Unadulterated delight on the face of a dancer like Ti-en-T.    The overall feeling?  Pure joy.

Crew Hug

On NPR’s website, there’s a video of babies matching movements to rhythms.It’s a report of scientists’ discovery — after they watched babies groove spontaneously, even to so-called “dry beats” — that the human tendency to move to a beat is innate. When babies do match moves to the beat, despite their primitive motor control,  they break into smiles.  As much as anything, underground hip hop dance is about such joy.  Y’all, please count me in.

Tunie's new rides

En route to finding the perfect agent, I’ve found that the majority of them now accept emailed queries, only.  A few tolerate snail mail as an alternative, and, one agency  – clearly an endangered species — demands a query exclusively by post.

The shift to email makes sense.  It requires no stationery or postage.  There’s no mail room support needed. And an agent (or the assistant) receiving 300 queries per month should be able to handle ten per day –even with a few sample pages — especially given the ridiculously sub-par submissions that take only moments to assess as unworthy.

Apparently, there are a lot of these.  I recently ran across a tell-all blog post (2-16-10) by an agency intern — a self-described “unpaid toiler who licks stamps and reads slush” –  obviously up to here with writers who know nothing about publishing and want her to help them figure it out.  AS IF she owed them the favor of a reply.  The title of the post is: being-kind-is-*soooooo*-inefficient. Predictably, it elicited few LOLs in the comments column. Writers feel pretty vulnerable, as it is.  It’s hard to chuckle at the possibility that kindness has become passe.

Only a few years ago, every query garnered at least a token nod from an agent or editor, their response, implying :  You’re-not-invisible/your-query-has-been-considered/better-luck-next-time. This expression of regret might materialize as a form letter or on a printed post card.  Not as helpful as a scribbled comment or a personalized letter, I admit, but an efficient way to extend to the writer common courtesy, your not-so-random act of kindness.

Suddenly it’s become okay for agencies to assert:  DON’T NECESSARILY RESPOND, or WILL ONLY RESPOND TO THOSE THAT INTEREST US, or UNSOLICITED MAIL MAY NOT BE ANSWERED.  Did the first person who typed such a warning cringe before doing so?  And how about:  PUT “QUERY” IN THE SUBJECT LINE BUT BE ADVISED THAT SPAM MAY TAKE IT ANYWAY?  It’s like saying: Your hard work and high hopes may be dissed or dismissed without further notice.  It’s up to you to guess, after a month or more, if this is the case, or if your query has regrettably ended up in Spam Hell instead.  This new wrinkle in agent-to-writer responses (or lack thereof) gives new meaning to the word submission.

I’m hoping that the intern who defends the practice of refusing to respond to “oddball letters” or “your train-wreck of a manuscript,” does not represent the new normal.  Is an industry standard related to honoring emailed queries a possibility?  Can everyone find the time to copy-and-paste a pre-cooked email?  (Several responded to the intern’s post with just such a suggestion — a ready-made message with a short list of links that provide advice for the clueless on how to get up to speed.)

Prep a few additional messages related to submissions, ready to copy-and-paste.  With a tap of the send key, the agent lets the writer know that a query has, in fact, reached its intended audience and that a verdict is in. No time to craft full sentences?  No patience for dealing in euphemisms?  Consider the IM model, keeping the zingers short and sweet:

CBNC:  Close But No Cigar, communicating that no further exchanges are needed or welcome, but that the query/pages were mildly interesting.

NOTHNX:  to the point –  Just not interested… not even sure why.

HELLNO, on the other hand, says:  Forget the query and tend to your story before it spontaneously combusts.

Of course, if need be, the go-ahead to send the entire manuscript could employ IM lingo, too:  BIO, short for Bring It On!, no doubt prompting the writer’s own SLAP, OMG:  Sounds Like A Plan, Oh-My-God-I’m-beyond-excited!

Or, in the case of excitement that gets out of hand, OMG, IMPEEN-N-PNTZ: Oh-my-God, I’m peeing in my pants.

Each required response-time clocks in at mere seconds.  Writers stay informed.  Agents/editors get to stay perched up on their ginormous pedestals.  What’s not to like?  Think it over.  Pass it on…

I am great.  I am shit.  I am great.  I am shit.

This drums in virtually every writer’s head, says Betsy Lerner in The Forest for the Trees.  In a blog post, she admits:  “I’ve never known a writer to say, I’m at the top of my game, or I killed a new chapter this morning, or I’ve got my next five books outlined, or People seem to really love my writing. It’s so much darkness and even more scratching. It’s living inside your head, brutal and beautiful.”

Which is why I’m feeling sheepish about having listed, in my previous post, her translations of euphemisms used when agents and editors are in rejection mode.  As if you didn’t have enough brutal moments when your work (and, by association, you) seemed, well, not enough. Especially since a rejection may have less to do with the quality of the work and more with the quality of those doing the rejecting.  Here’s what Robert Olen Butler, in From Where You Dream, reminds writers… after they have visited their work as if someone else has written it, after they’ve done the best they possibly can with revising it, and once they’ve sent the work winging:

“If somebody rejects the story, with whatever criticism… you let it go.  What is the editorial reader’s frame of mind?  They have fifty things on their desk today and there are going to be fifty tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.  Do you think this puts them in a frame of mind where they are naked to each manuscript they open?  Where they put aside the worldview they’ve held all their lives and open up to a new voice, a new vision of the world.  Rarely.  That’s why a lot of bad stuff gets perpetuated, the bland stuff and the mediocre stuff.  It’s because often those screening readers – I’m talking about those first two people who see it – those readers, just by the very nature of what they do, are going to be if not consciously looking for, at least more open to, things familiar to them.  So all this works against the unique voice of the real artist.”

He’s a believer in slow reading if one is to capture a work’s essence: “Speed-reading is one reason editors and, not incidentally, book reviewers can be so utterly wrongheaded about a particular work of art.”  Here’s agent Lerner (in a 2-14-10 post) asking (a tad guiltily, perhaps?):  “Do you skim when you read? And if so, when? When you’re bored, when the section doesn’t interest you, when you just want to know what happened? And for how long?  Just a few sentences, paragraphs, whole chapters? And do you ever get anxious that you missed the one important detail that will explain everything in the end? Do you skim fiction and not non-fiction, or the other way around? Does everyone do it but no one admits it?”

Dani Shapiro writes in the L.A. Times about how hard it is to make it as a writer.  But she concludes:  The writer who has experienced [the transformative power of writing] even for a moment becomes hooked on it and is willing to withstand the rest. Insecurity, rejection and disappointment are a price to pay, but those of us who have served our time in the frozen tundra will tell you that we’d do it all over again if we had to. And we do. Each time we sit down to create something, we are risking our whole selves. But when the result is the transformation of anger, disappointment, sorrow, self-pity, guilt, perverseness and wounded innocence into something deep and concrete and abiding — that is a personal and artistic triumph well worth the long and solitary trip.”

Hanging out at a practice session at Central Mission on Thursday (where the graffiti above adorns a wall)… a fabulous young b-girl told me that she’s had cancer and is just finishing treatment.  That she had a mastectomy.  That she was unable to do the thing she loves for six months.  That when she came back to break dance and to her crew, her body had forgotten all the moves.  But she is relearning them.  She is persevering.  And here’s the thing:  “It’s saved my life,” she said.

It’s the ego that sees lack, that makes us feel broken in the face of rejection.  But the soul is steadfast, moving us from the point of fear to a place of peace.  It calls me to my greater self, and you to yours.  Calls us to do what we love.

Write on.