Author: Kelley

Susan the Brave

I am the seven millionth person to blog about Susan Boyle, which makes me a little late to the party, but just in case you haven’t seen this clip — I promise, your time will not be wasted.

Susan Boyle auditioned recently for the reality show “Britain’s Got Talent.” This is what happened.


click here if you can’t see the player

The reason we tell this kind of story over and over in books and movies is because sometimes life has these storybook moments. And because people have dreams that are private and powerful; and sometimes we find our courage and seize the moment when it comes, even when it means walking out on stage to jeers and catcalls. It’s one of the bravest things I’ve seen in a long time. And one of the clearest examples that talent isn’t enough for these stories we love so much: there must also be guts.

Sometimes being brave only gets us through the next week or day or minute. But sometimes it gets us right to the heart of the dream. And sometimes we have to go through years of being brave over and over, protecting the dream, until we get the chance to show our guts. If Susan Boyle can be so brave, then I guess I can too.

Small joys

The taxes are done, the house is clean, the sun is shining. I’ve been back to the gym after a week of repelling Viral Invaders. I am full of tea and a bit of the Easter chocolate that Nicola’s father sent us. I am pondering a new screenplay idea that fell into my head while I was washing dishes this morning. I have U2 tickets for the US fall tour. I am reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I have watched three movies this week.

When I was in my teens and early 20’s, I imagined a Big Life for myself. And I’m having it; I just didn’t know that the real payoff of big risk and hard work would be the saturation and joy of these moments that I would have called small back then.

More thoughts on Amazonfail

I’ve posted The lessons of Amazonfail at Humans At Work.

Thanks to everyone who’s been joining the Great Online Conversation, sharing information, and taking action. Although my books haven’t been de-ranked, Nicola’s have, and that hurts me emotionally and economically. I’m looking forward to Amazon honoring their stated intention to restore the de-ranked books. And I hope the attention, the demands for reparation, and the uproar will not stop until those books — all of them — are restored.

In which cat poetry is better than mine

My fifth grade teacher taught us how to write all manner of poetry: sonnet, haiku, cinquain, free verse, ballads…

Ballads! Oh dear, I feel a memory coming on: I am 11. I already have very bad handwriting, which is not allowed in my school and so it takes me ages to copy out My Ballad in acceptable form. And of course it is long (it seems that even then I was already wordy. Already riffing. Well, at least you know it’s not some lit’rary affection I picked up along the way…). And I don’t know if this is funny or sad, but I actually remember the beginning verses…

‘Twas in the gallant days of old
When chivalry did reign
That Gowain did ride to Waterside
His fortune for to gain.

Gowain was an honest lad and bold
The son of Duke LaRoot.
He did aspire to be a squire
To some knight of repute.

So through the forest he did go
A-riding down the lane,
When by and by he heard a cry
As of someone in pain.

And so he rode into a glade
And saw a maiden fair
Who in distress lay motionless
And blood was in her hair….

And that, fortunately for you, Gentle Reader, is all that remains of my very first/very last ballad. I suspect I would not have made my fortune in bardic times, you know? But I’ll always be grateful to Virginia Richardson for being the first to teach me about poetry.

And I’m grateful to Henry Beard for his lovely book Poetry for Cats, which has always delighted me. Today I’m particularly fond of this one — I find it clever and cat-like and utterly delightful. Perhaps you’ll like it too.

Happy Monday.

—–
(from Poetry for Cats by Henry Beard)

The End of the Raven
by Edgar Allen Poe’s Cat

On a night quite unenchanting, when the rain was downward slanting,
I awakened to the ranting of the man I catch mice for.
Tipsy and a bit unshaven, in a tone I found quite craven,
Poe was talking to a Raven perched above the chamber door.
“Raven’s very tasty,” thought I, as I tiptoed o’er the floor,
     “There is nothing I like more.”

Soft upon the rug I treaded, calm and careful as I headed
Toward his roost atop that dreaded bust of Pallas I deplore.
While the bard and birdie chattered, I made sure that nothing clattered,
Creaked, or snapped, or fell, or shattered, as I crossed the corridor;
For his house is crammed with trinkets, curios and weird decor —
     Bric-a-brac and junk galore.

Still the Raven never fluttered, standing stock-still as he uttered,
In a voice that shrieked and sputtered, his two cents’ worth — “Nevermore.”
While this dirge the birdbrain kept up, oh, so silently I crept up,
Then I crouched and quickly leapt up, pouncing on the feathered bore.
Soon he was a heap of plumage, and a little blood and gore —
     Only this and not much more.

“Oooo!” my pickled poet cried out, “Pussycat, it’s time I dried out!
Never sat I in my hideout talking to a bird before;
How I’ve wallowed in self-pity, while my gallant, valiant kitty
Put an end to that damned ditty” — then I heard him start to snore.
Back atop the door I clambered, eyed that statue I abhor,
     Jumped — and smashed it on the floor.

Tell Amazon they are wrong

I had a cheerful poem for you today, until I got the email that described Amazon.com’s new policy on removing the sales ranking feature from books with “adult content” — which apparently is code for anything they decide might offend someone. Please go read this thoughtful post from the always-on-target Kassia Krozser for a concise and pointed overview of the situation.

Yes, books with heterosexual content are getting de-ranked: but there are many straight-sexplicit books that aren’t (Laurell Hamilton’s books, with all kinds of body parts coming together every ten pages or so, are still ranked. Or maybe that’s just because Amazon makes so much money selling her books that they can’t afford to piss her off?)

Let’s see Amazon go after Hamilton. Let’s see them remove sales rankings from every single Harlequin romance writer who’s ever been on the best-seller list. Oh, and let’s not forget The Godfather.

Because they’ve already done it to many, many LGBT books, including Nicola’s. Go on, see for yourself — no more sales ranks. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until they reach me. And it’s hugely damaging to any author. It means that the author’s books don’t show up in searches of what’s popular, no matter how many books she’s actually selling. It means that new buyers who are browsing sales-rank-generated lists will never even see her books mentioned.

Happily, authors, editors, publishers, critics and readers aren’t sitting still for this. We’re all over Twitter and the web (check #amazonfail at Twitter).

I’m not currently assuming that Amazon has become the Great Homophobic Bookseller of the World. I am assuming that someone made a hasty, boneheaded policy decision, implemented it clumsily, and then completely failed to anticipate the response. I very much hope, for Amazon’s sake, that someone with brains and authority has left their Easter goose uneaten and is trying to pull Amazon’s goose out of the fire right now. Because the online firestorm is building.

What can we do? Let’s put on our boots and get out there with the crowd. Thanks to Cheryl Morgan for pointing me to this petition, which I hope you will consider signing. If you’re an Amazon customer, please consider sending them an email of protest. If you’re on Twitter, please tweet tweet tweet.

And let’s hope we can do something about this.

Girl music

I have a new blogtoy — this lovely mp3 player from Tracy Fu that will let me put playlists in posts. Hah. Brace yourselves — I think there’s music in our future. Since Friday Pint is done, perhaps there needs to be a music day. Stay tuned to this station…

Today’s playlist is “All About Girls,” and it’s about… well, you know. Perfect music for a spring Saturday, to my mind. If I have to do taxes all day, at least there’s music.

Enjoy your Saturday.

Edited to add: I’m sorry to say that I don’t have enough server space for all my audio, so most jukebox playlists become inactive after a few months. This is one. Very sorry. But the music is worth seeking out, it’s great!

To use the E-Phonic MP3 Player you will need Adobe Flash Player 9 or better and a Javascript enabled browser.

Hope is a privilege

Living without any real hope of the future… changes you.
— Ian Welsh, from “The Personal Politics of Hopelessness”

I talk a lot about hope. And I’ve talked about being a class-jumper, thanks to the hard work of my parents, and my own hard work, and luck. I think hard about the path of my life: the circumstances that took me from a comfortable home to a crumbly one, enough money to not enough, and then propelled me like a rocket into one of the most elite schools on the planet, still poor and suddenly aware that the people I’d thought were “rich” in the relative backwater of Tampa, Florida probably couldn’t have gotten in the front door with the parents of the kids I saw around me. I learned about a whole new kind of rich those four years.

And I learned again the lessons of not enough as soon as I left St. Paul’s. But I knew that somehow I had to find my way back to enough. And it wasn’t just about money anymore — what I learned at my privileged prep school was that elite people had richness of experience. Richness of life.

Part of that richness, I now understand, has to do with the privilege of a baseline assumption that things will always work out. And one of the hardest things about being poor, apart from the actual experience of poverty, is the baseline assumption that things will not work out. This baseline assumption, and its pervasive influence on individual humans and the culture as a whole, is very well explained in this Huffington Post essay by Ian Welsh on the personal politics of hopelessness.

It’s really speaking to me. I haven’t had his experience — I’ve never been on welfare, and I do have a BA, and there’s that prep school education — but I’ve had the shitty jobs, sometimes three at a time, and I’ve felt some of these same feelings. Those are hard stories to tell without sounding either self-aggrandizing (oh, look how much I’ve suffered) or self-pitying (oh, look how much I’ve suffered) or self-justifying (it’s okay that I’m a solidly middle-class well-educated white girl because oh, look how much I’ve suffered). So I won’t try today. But I’m thinking about those times, and I’m feeling for the people who are in them right now.

I often get prickly when people talk about “the elites.” I dislike categorization, and I have enough experience of being both elite and oppressed that it gets a little confusing for me sometimes. But I get what Welsh is talking about in this article: and I am sorry to say that I think he’s right, that there’s an elite class in this country that doesn’t get it at all because they have no direct reference points of any kind on which to base an empathic* response. I don’t think every rich person is this kind of elite; but I’ve met the true elite, and among them are people with the puzzled, amused stare of utter lack of understanding: Well, just get your dad to put some more money in your account.

We are reaping the whirlwind of What Happens When Those Folks are In Charge. Part of what happens is the spread of personal hopelessness. That angers me, and somehow makes me feel ashamed as well, for reasons that aren’t clear to me.

Anyway, I think it’s a great essay, and I’d like to know what you think of it.

—-
(* with a nod to Robin)

Life, in pictures

LIFE Magazine has a website.

I am a writer and express myself in words, always words (millions of words… I thanked Nicola last night for being patient with me while I processed something, and she laughed and said, Darling, if I couldn’t cope with processing we would have split up nineteen years ago). But when it comes to events in the real world, I often like them better expressed in pictures. There’s something about photographs — their power to capture a real person in a real moment (or a not-so-real moment), the sense of being there — that I find compelling.

If I want to learn about an experience, deepen my understanding of it, I’ll go read about it. But often what I want is to know how it felt. The best photographs dissolve the barriers of space and time and bring me straight into the moment, the immediate there-and-then. Novels and stories put me into the moments too, of course, but they are a process. Probably why I do them (grin). Words take me into myself: photos take me bang! straight into other places.

I grew up with LIFE magazine. In my day, LIFE and National Geographic were the pinnacles of photographic journalism — information and story crystallized into a single arresting image, or series of images. Humans, the world, stillness and motion, life and death, the majestic and the ridiculous — moments of real life that will never come again, but we can see them. In pictures.

I’m still puzzling through my response to photos. I must say that mostly, other people’s vacation pictures and endless wedding photos don’t really do much for me. My wedding photos feel special to me, in part because they were taken by our friend Mark, also a writer, someone who knows how to tell stories in pictures and in words. But even so, I don’t expect them to be special to other people (grin). Mostly, I find my own life as captured in photos less compelling than the real thing. But good photographers record the story, not just the image, and there are some stories of my life that I wish very much I could have such a clear, true record of. That would take me back bang! to the there-and-then. Just for a visit. Just for a moment.

Life’s for sharing

This was filmed at Liverpool Street Station in London earlier this year, during an actual commute day (in other words, real people are in for a real surprise).

Forget that it’s a commercial. Just have fun.

And because Fun = Good, have some more (thanks to Jennifer for pointing me to this one).

It’s a great ad campaign. It makes me want their phones and their service. And that’s fine with me. If they have this kind of imagination anywhere in their company, and the wit to approve this and make it happen, they can have my money. Because look how much fun everyone’s having. The people dancing, the people watching, the people sharing it all on their cell phones… Look at the comments on YouTube from people who went away a little more happy for having seen other people dance, smile, share.

I hope, I hope, that this is what the future really holds. That the mighty interweb and all our technology won’t just be about retreating into our little fleshpods and broadcasting ourselves one-way into the world. I hope that the future really is about connectivity. We have so much that’s hard to share right now; look how easy it is to share the good as well. Now there’s a thing worth doing.

I stand in awe of all the ways that human beings can create joy. Aren’t people amazing?

Women inventing cool stuff

I’m sure you already know that women have invented some really cool stuff
 (and yes, a lot of them did it like Ginger, in high heels and backwards).

I’m not good for much today — still making my stand at the precipice of microbial infestation, repelling invaders with my mighty ibuprofen and vitamin C — but I betcha none of these women would have let a little illness stop them from inventing frozen pizzas or torpedo guidance systems. And as soon as I stop hacking my lungs up, I’m going to be just like them.

Women who make things impress the hell out of me. I made a box once that would hold a full water glass stable on the nightstand so the cat couldn’t knock it over at night (our Bella, Zack’s sister, had a passion for bopping things until they fell down). It was just a little thing, but I made it myself, and it pleased Nicola enormously. It’s probably the only useful thing I even conceived and executed in that particular inventive way.

So I admire the women in this article tremendously. If you know about any other cool women inventors, please feel free to share here.

Enjoy your Monday.