I’ve been semi-following the #queryfail and #agentfail debacle for some time, with guarded interest.  Yes, a morbid part of me wants to watch a bunch of authors and agents have a web 2.0 go at each other, just as a morbid part of me loves cheesy action flicks and sappy romances (it’s entertainment, pure and simple).  But frankly, the whole thing also makes me feel dirty: I don’t like thinking that the agent-author relationship has been reduced to a high school drama, because, if you really want the truth, I’m not any good at dealing with high school drama, and I don’t want it to be true that a world I fundamentally respect, in spite of its faults, is no more virtuous than some bitchy cafeteria.

So it’s been interesting trawling through the ostensibly educational comments that agents have made about authors, and vice versa.  And, yes, it’s so terrible, the agents are just so mean, and, like, really, can I help it if they don’t think my last name will look good on the cover of a book?  And equally, those agents are rats, they never respond, and ohmygod all I want is a form rejection letter but boo-hoo they’re too busy on Twitter and Facebook and getting drunk at inappropriate hours to spend ten seconds on the masterpiece that took me ten years.

But still.  So much has already been written about all this since #queryfail debuted as an idea in March that I couldn’t really find anything to write about it that wouldn’t seem like a needless rehash (no pun intended) of a needlessly popular topic.  But yesterday, something clicked in my mind as I was reading this post by Jean Hannah Edelstein on the Guardian’s book blog.  For several paragraphs the post is a spectacularly uninteresting, though possibly necessary, reminder that literary agents do a lot more than sip champagne at the Ivy over glamorous lunchtime meetings.  But towards the end of her post Edelstein finally hits upon something genuinely intriguing.  “Agents serve as a crucial linchpin,” she writes, “…ensuring that the publisher-author relationship stays positive so that nuanced contractual disagreements don’t get in the way of the writing and editing of a good book.”  She then reminds us of a growing trend, whereby writers, frustrated perhaps by the enormity of the conventional publishing-machine, the hoops, the rejections, the time spent crafting fiddly query letters which may or may not end up hash-tagged to the general amusement of a thousand onlookers, hungry for fodder or a quick ego-boost, reject the machine entirely and bray that self-publishing will bring about the happy end to literary agents.

“All of which is fine,” writes Edelstein, “so long as these writers are happy to devote their lives to all of the extensive hard work that goes in to making a book exist – and sell – long after the final words have been written. The problem, of course, is that all of this work is so extensive that it can really eat in to your writing time.”

Funny, that.  Edelstein has hit upon something that many of us, as writers, may have forgotten in the scramble to get back at the cruel agents who participated in #queryfail, or may have forgotten even before the first Twitter-savvy agent hit “#”: the point of obtaining a literary agent, surely, is not so we can make another tick in the success column and feel that somehow, we’ve won the game.  It’s so that we can commence a complicated and rewarding relationship with someone who will, ultimately, allow us to do what we most desperately want to do: write for an audience.  Agents are enablers, not sticker-happy 2nd grade teachers who are there merely to reward our hard work.

So how has it come to this?  I don’t know for sure, but I can hazard a guess.  The problem is not that writers, as a species, are fundamentally stupid and self-loathing, nor that agents are universally vitriolic and inhuman.  The problem, as illustrated by the #queryfail and #agentfail trends, but certainly not started by them, is that somewhere along the line, the literary world stopped being so much about words and ideas and started being about winning and losing.

We see this every day.  The only aspect of the literary world that’s continually stressed is that it’s competitive.  As a writer, it’s all you hear.  Publishing houses, literary agencies, newspapers, magazines, tiny online literary journals, seem to exist solely to remind us of the unlikelihood of our success, to remind us that from the vast pool of writhing would-be authors, we’re probably not going to be picked out as special.  It’s not personal, just circumstantial: statistics matter most.

I understand the necessity of reminding people that they need to work hard, produce nothing but the best–it keeps you from becoming lazy, from thinking for even a moment that you do not have to care deeply about what you do and then spend more time than you thought possible crafting and nurturing every sentence.  What I don’t understand is why that’s all we’re ever reminded of, and I applaud Edelstein for suggesting that there’s more depth to the agent-author relationship than failing or not failing.

So the problem with #queryfail and #agentfail, and the subsequent deluge of commentary about both, is not that either is fundamentally unfair, mean-spirited, or an example of Twitter gone wrong.  But neither can we laud #queryfail and #agentfail for providing a much-needed insight into the minds of agents and authors–articles attempting to glean anything useful from the stream of drivel and hilarity, such as this one, fall spectacularly flat (anyone who is seriously looking for an agent already knows to read submission guidelines like they’re going to save your life).  What we can do, however, is wonder why we’re so worried about failure, and so desperately convinced that writing and publishing is some sort of blood sport, that we’ve forgotten to do whatever it is we love–and, more crucially, forgotten that each party, the agents, the authors, needs the other.

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I don’t know how to make myself go for a run.  I don’t know how to remember how good it feels, I mean really remember, so that I’ll climb the stairs and shed my Saturday clothes in favour of something that will seep up the sweat.  I don’t know how to reconcile the fact that I have never done it for anybody but myself, or with anybody but myself.  How to tell myself that the darker it gets, the less I’ll want to go out, because the whole point is to see things (isn’t it?), and not to run blind in a straight black line under the mist, the April stars that must be hiding somewhere, the haze of streetlights.

So what if I only do it so I can feel the city air run past my body? So what if I never go far enough, for long enough, hard enough?  At least I do it.  So what if my favorite part is the part after?  (I’ve never told anybody that, it would be cheating, I’ve let myself think, but forget cheating, for awhile.)

The part where I can feel my muscles and my bones and my breath.

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I wonder how much else I can not get done today?  It’s already early evening (though how could you tell, the quality of the light is so bland, has looked the same since early morning, nothing but grey, not even shadows to make the streets more interesting) and I’ve managed to avoid doing anything of worth, even thinking anything of worth.  In the rather optimistic hopes of being inspired (ha!  what a word for this day) I convinced myself to remove five books from the shelf.  I even convinced myself to open the books.  That’s a good step, right?  I smelled the books (generally helps me get things going), even read bits of them.  I noted a few helpful or interesting quotes.  Then I promptly moved everything but my computer to the other side of the couch, where I have taken up residence, and spent an hour staring over the top of my MacBook at the plants in our front yard.  And the To Let sign on the house opposite, thinking, as I always do when I see To Let signs, that I’d like to put an “i” in the middle of the two words.  And also thinking that it’s been available to let for about as long as I can remember, which is funny, because people seem to be living quite comfortably in it.  We once even saw what could have been nothing less than twenty students pour from its front door one morning, squinting and looking unmistakably hungover (if we’d opened the window we might even have been able to smell the stale remanants of last night’s booze).  Maybe they’re squattors.  But they had that coiffed-hair, popped-collar, Jack Wills-y look, and I don’t think people like that tend to squat.  Just a thought.

Now it’s Simon and Garfunkel again, because that helped last week, but it isn’t helping today, and apparently I’m bound to just work myself up into a small and useless panic about my own lack of productivity this afternoon.  Let the jolts of anxiety followed by bouts of self-pity followed by elated declarations of not caring commence…

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It’s officially springtime.  We can’t deny it: the flowers are in full bloom, the trees are gaining leaves again, and it’s dribbling a constant stream of irritating but not spectacular rain this holiday weekend.  We’ve successfully emerged from yet another winter, scarred, shivering, pale like ghosts but oh so ready to enter a heady few months of bare legs, punting, and cider on ice (or, alternatively, wet jeans, debates about whether or not to turn the heater on, and endless cups of tea).  The ice-cream truck is bravely making its rounds again, and I can promise that by June I will be so tired of hearing its little ditty that I’ll start to actually resent the warmth I spent so long dreaming of in darkest January.  The sunlight stays until nearly 8 o’clock, and I’ve  begun to wander the streets again, with my iPod and a vague but mutable destination.

And it’s baseball season.  This has been as impossible to ignore, even from the cozy, television-free rooms of our East Oxford house, as it ever was when I lived so close to Fenway Park that I could hear the shouts of the fans from my bedroom (one summer the boom from a celebratory flyover left me thinking for an instant that a bomb had gone off somewhere).  But by baseball season, what I really mean is Red Sox season.  I’m starting to think that there’s an unspoken brotherhood of people who lived in Boston and left, who experience at this time of year variations on a strange but similar nostalgia for the hum of those first few games, concurrent with the first few really nice days of the season when everyone leaves their cramped and frigid apartments for the hills of the Boston Common and the people-watching on Newbury street.  Sudden throngs, bare-armed for the first time in months, stroll past shoestores full of sandals, gather en masse at JP Licks or Emack and Bolio’s.  Near Fenway they start selling “Yankees Suck” infant onesies and “Jeter sucks A Rod” t-shirts with great gusto, and the streets are littered not with patches of urine-stained snow but discarded flyers, programs, plastic cups.  In the thick evening air you can hear shouts of glee or of rage, see the white glow of stadium lights.  You can smell cheap beer and burgers, and suddenly all you want is a cheap beer and a burger, too.

I never liked baseball any more than a girl should.  I was restrained in my enthusiasm for it, sometimes bordering on apathetic.  But I confess to feeling a sort of elation, probably more tied to that which was human than that which was sport-related, when the Red Sox won their first world series in over 80 years.  I had moved to Boston only a few months previous, so my introduction to the city, really, was the crowds that took to the streets; when we beat the Yankees in the playoffs, subway cars filled with people yelling “Yankees Suck!” in almost military unison, and I still wonder if maybe the green line train didn’t make it to Kenmore on the power of excitement alone.  When they won it again a few years later you could actually taste a strange disappointment in the air; Red Sox fans, perhaps a little like England football fans, are attached to their suffering, and the win was too soon, they hadn’t had time yet to finish celebrating the 2004 victory, let alone settle into a rhythm of loss and frustration.  

I don’t follow the sport much now; but it follows me.  Casual references from other bloggers, on twitter, facebook, all the things that keep us weirdly connected to worlds we thought we’d left, remind me even on this rainy Oxford afternoon of what baseball season in Boston feels like.

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There are strange flowers blooming.  I’m watching the almost-rainy day unfold in the back garden (the dead-rat smell has dissipated enough now to make the study a viable place to spend time again).  It’s heavenly: things are green, or starting to be green.  The grass has new, fragile vibrancy; the trees, which have looked naked for so long, are budding tiny leaves at long last.  Weeds are springing up in the flower pots and when the wind ruffles branches and stalks it’s easy to believe that things out there are alive.  That maybe we’ll all start to thaw out, now.

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