Dream Journal: We Deceive the Church

This morning's last dream before waking consisted largely of my Twitter friend, the brilliant and bold Harrison Brace (aka "Vautrin"), and I devising a system of duping people into believing that we were satisfying requirements of being "regular church-goers," which in turn was going to allow us to gain all kinds of advantages in certain social situations. The whole narrative is unclear as to all the advantages we had hoped to gain, but part of it had to with the fact that we were about to head out on a long road trip through "church-controlled territories" and we wanted to somehow game the system set up by the dominant culture. It's interesting to me that my subconscious provided Harrison to me as my partner in the scheme because in real life (or at least from what I know of him in Twitter life) he possesses the qualities of clear and quick thinking, intellectual daring and iconoclasm that such a plot required in this dream environment.

The scheme seems to have hatched when Harrison and I found ourselves in attendance at what appeared, in its language and forms, to be a Catholic mass. We were dismayed to have landed ourselves in this situation, but Harrison perceived a quick way out of it: this service occurred not in a proper church but in a sort of open quadrangle located between a bunch of buildings on what looked to be a college campus, and the mass itself was conducted in a three-ring-circus style with different priests conducting different sections of it simultaneously, and the congregants were able to mill around the periphery of this and focus on whichever "ring" appeared the most interesting. Harrison chose for us the "ring" with the fewest people in attendance. "Everyone who is serious about this is over there," he said, pointing across the quad, "where the main priest is." We realized that the ring we were watching was being run by a lay person and that it would be considerably shorter than the portions going on elsewhere. "Brilliant," I said to him. "This will be over in two minutes but we'll still get full credit for having attended."

"Credit" consisted of being issued, upon leaving the quad, a metallic lapel pin with an image of a Christian cross superimposed over an American flag. It also bore a tiny date stamp. We collected our pins, quite delighted with how easily we had obtained them, chuckling about what a sham it was that going to church for two minutes and not even paying attention can get one as much "credit" as attending the whole thing and actually caring about it. What a bunch of dupes the latter group was, we thought! We walked through a pleasant tree-lined street where a bunch of vendors had set up tables and were hawking a wide range of wares. Harrison noticed that someone was selling plastic zip bags filled with blanks of those church lapel pins. "We could buy these and then just put stickers on them," he said. He said that we could print the cross/flag images at home on "glossine sticker paper" and even date them individually, thus creating "credit" for having attended church for any date we wished without going for even two minutes. We realized that when we did our cross-country trip we would be able to breeze through the checkpoints because our shirt collars and jackets would be festooned with church credit pins. I worried if the fraudulent pins would bear close scrutiny, but he pointed out how cheaply-made the real ones were. "That's all they're doing, just printing stickers." Then he started laughing raucously, while looking at his iPad (which I guess just appeared somehow). He showed me an image of an alternative church pin that someone online had created. It was a big round yellow smily face button with the words "I went to church today!" printed around the outer edge of it. The dream ended right there because this was so fucking funny in the dream environment that I started laughing for real and woke myself up, literally laughing so hard as to make tears stream down my cheeks. Fortunately Jeff was already up and about or he would have been pretty annoyed by this!

The Twitter Effect on otherwise sensible discussion and debate

I won't name names here because I don't want to offend anyone and, indeed, I intend no offense. Yesterday I observed a rather intense debate on Twitter between a well-known, well-regarded literary agent and an accomplished professional writer, the main issue of which seemed to be whether or not it's legitimate for an agent or an editor to dismiss  a writer's work based on details of its content (as distinct from whether the book's genre is appropriate or not for a particular agent or editor). The content in contention here was characters depicted as smoking.

Let me back up a bit. Not everyone reading this probably participates in Twitter. It can be a terrifically useful tool for networking with colleagues, chatting with friends and promoting one's work. I use it for all three. But what it's not always very good for is a couple of little things like "context" and "nuance." It sucks for having an argument with someone. The very nature of the format--short little statements limited to 140 characters in length, which often appear with small delays and even out of chronological order sometimes--makes it quite a dicey proposition to use it for a multi-statement, back-and-forth exchange over a disagreement. It is really easy for two people who maybe aren't even that far apart in their viewpoint to suddenly flame up into an angry shouting situation. But the fully public nature of it is great when someone like me, who does not know either of these people, can observe something interesting.

I happened to see a tweet from the agent where she was passing along the info that another agent was open for submissions of YA fiction, but that writers should not bother to submit if their characters smoke. The agent concurred that smoking sucks and that she doesn't like to see it on TV shows either. OK, fine. That's the preference of this agent and at least one other. Personally, it doesn't worry me that much and I do not judge it as some kind of moral failing or menace to society and certainly would't reject a story based on that alone, but nor does it bother me that some agents and editors do have a problem with it. Well, later on, the writer that I mentioned above appeared to have engaged with the agent over this, making the case (in a way that the Twitter Effect probably made seem a lot more shrill than it really was from his perspective) that the fiction ought to be judged on its merits as fiction and not just on little failings of the characters. People in real life, after all, do things like smoke (and drink and have sex). It struck him as censorious that an agent or editor would ignore these realities and issue a blanket ban on smoking (and by extension, he seemed to think, other "vices," though those did not come up much in the Tweets that I read). What kind of head-in-the-sand person would be like that? seemed to be his position. This, of course (enhanced probably by the Twitter Effect), caused the agent to respond quite forcefully in defense of her position. Which was simply that all editors have preferences (obviously) and it would be dumb and incompetent for an agent or writer to submit a story with smoking in it to an editor who has made it clear that she doesn't like people smoking in novels. To the writer, the argument was about art and reality, and to the agent is was about business and good professional practices.

Well, they were both right in their own ways, and it appeared to me that the whole thing flared up obnoxiously because they were talking about different things. I wasn't able to keep following it for very long, and it's possible that they solved their dispute and made peace. I hope so. At the base of it, the agent was just pointing out that a writer or agent will have more success with an editor if her submission matches the particular editor's preference. That's as common as common sense can get. If I submitted my NaNo novel to the local conservative religious book publisher, it would be quickly rejected because it has nothing to do with their preferences. If a writer submitted to my zine an item of When Harry Met Sally fan fiction, I would turn that away, too, for the same reason, and I'd wonder why the writer sent it to me in the first place and probably think they were incompetent for having done so. Just as the religious publisher would think that of me if I sent them my story about gay people with a bunch of sex and drinking in it. I don't think the writer who was arguing with the agent would disagree with any of this if he had encountered it anywhere else other than the context/nuance-free zone that Twitter can be at its worst. But, on the other hand, I sympathize with his apparent attitude that it's kind of priggish and silly to evaluate writing and story on something like a character smoking. But if you are determined to have smoking in your story, I am sure there are plenty of places to send it still, and it would be simple good sense to avoid the venues that ban it (obviously this would be a very different issue if, say, the government banned smoking in books, but that's not what this was about).

And I now know of a couple fewer possible people to show my NaNo novel to should I ever polish it up for submission (it has some smoking in it).