But today: introspection. I’ve got my Leo Kottke on; I’ve got my coffee on; I’ve got these awesome slippers. It’s go time.

I return often to this weird binary that I’ve found myself in since October 2008: that I’m doing two things, for no money, that mean a lot to me, viz. my research and my writing. If you’ll recall, I once suggested knitting as an antidote to all that good fortune. But I haven’t done any knitting since Christmas, and I broke the one rule I had for it: I did it for something other than fun. This is what happens when it’s Christmas and you don’t have stock options: you start knitting furiously, anything you can knit, and give what comes of it to the people you love. For me, it was coasters and potholders (with STRIPES), because I can only do squares and rectangles. Around 20 December my knitting became a bit like my typing speed: I could do three or four coasters in a night. My mother-in-law and I raced each other. And yeah, that was fun. But I remember a moment when I thought this: ‘Tonight I have to get that knitting done.’ That’s when I knew I’d broken the knitting law, and that’s when I dropped knitting.

I really hope I pick it up again. After all, knitting is awesome.

This is when I realised that I’m starting to treat these things I love - my research and my writing - like items on a to-do list. When I realised they were so overwhelming that I had to break them down into bite-sized chunks to make them feasible and achievable. And listen, that’s not cool. I’ve spent enough of my life in offices saying ‘This Isn’t What I Do’. Now I’m living in England - something I’ve wanted more or less my whole life - and I’m doing doctoral studies and writing a novel (two things I’ve wanted arguably longer than that). This is my entire remit. Not only is it what I want to do; it’s what other people want me to do, too. My family helps me; my friends take flattering interest. I am pretty much the luckiest girl in the world.

So whither novel?

When things get too overwhelming, I go under. Not in a bad way - I made it sound dire just there - but I put myself in my own form of sensory deprivation (that sounds dire too). I put my headphones on; I watch TV. I listen to audiobooks. I buzz around the flat like this - balancing my laptop in the crook of my elbow and watching Jack McCoy put the System On Trial, or listening to Alex Jennings reading Nicholas Nickleby - and do the laundry, scrub the kitchen, rearrange the medicine cabinet. I forget I have a phone; I forget I have friends; I forget I have remits, and most especially, I especially forget I have remits that I love. Because that’s the worst of all: if you love it and you’re avoiding it, what in fuck does that mean? I don’t want to know, that’s what.

I’ve got this arsenal of sensory deprivation. I have TV and audiobooks and video games. Mike tells me I keep the flat a little too clean; he comes home and doesn’t know where any of his clothes are. And when the flat is too clean, I know I’m not getting enough work done. I used to think that it was Twitter and Facebook that were eating up my whole life; now I check Facebook about once a month. It’s the TV and the audiobooks and the video games. It’s not procrastination; I’m not really falling behind. But it frightens me that I’m doing what’s expected of me and nothing near like what I know I’m capable of. That I’m sloughing this off - this stuff that I always opined I would give my lifeblood to if I just had the time.

I almost didn’t post this because I thought: hey, it’s lunchtime; time for leftover bolognese and the Season 18 premiere of Law & Order. What a lunch! And then - aha - I see that that’s the problem. I shouldn’t be watching bloody TV with my downtime. I should be reading books. I don’t read enough books. I should be going for walks; I don’t see enough of the world. I should be looking out the window; I should be lying on the floor; I should be sensing things. I should be going back to those places - mental and physical - that made me love reading and writing in the first place. I should be eavesdropping on people down the pub. I should be visiting cemeteries and connecting with the amazing eighteenth-century midwives I admire so much.

Even listening to Dickens is no excuse. It’s all well and good - I recommend it to anyone - but Dickens isn’t what’s selling right now. Dickens tells me about two hundred years ago; I need to either be learning about three hundred years ago, four hundred years ago, or now.

So now I’m surrounded by a mess, a real mess - I can make those really quickly. There’s a sinkful of dishes in the kitchen, a load of linens sitting in the hall, a myriad of Diet Coke cans and books and papers and ointments sitting on my desk. I have to keep the mess. I’m going to spend my lunch hour with my headphones off. I’m going to hear the jackhammer out the window and let the wind in and write. For an hour I’m going to give the world my full attention, just to see what it feels like.

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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One way and another, I recently came across this article, entitled ‘The Disadvantages of an Elite Education’. For these purposes, we need only this snippet:

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work.

So says Mr (pardon me: Doctor) Ivy League.

If all goes well, I’m going to graduate with a doctorate from the best history faculty in the world in eighteen-odd months. I’m going to be Dr Sarah (Cantab). And my question is this: where in fuck does this guy get off? Or, put another way, I really don’t think the problem is with his education. Not his Ivy League education, anyway.

This sort of thinking seems to be endemic among people with postgraduate educations. They think they’re different. OK, maybe they are: they’re nerds. But hold on; someone’s about to start flailing hands and hollering that I’m missing the point. He’s talking about an elite education. Rich schools for rich kids. But again, here I am at a rich school for rich kids (I personally don’t know any rich kids, and I’m certainly not rich myself, but there you are), and all I can think is what the hell?

For reasons passing understanding, there is a perceived value difference between the hyper-educated and good, sensible people. But this guy makes it sound like apartheid: that there is such a gulf between those within the ivory tower and those without that we can’t possibly understand each other. He makes himself out to be the Earl of Bedford trying to milk a cow.

Again, I’m about to be told that I’m misinterpreting: maybe this is a specifically American thing, as so many things are?

The real question is: does education change you, or does it just fail to correct what was wrong with you in the first place? It’s no joke that most of the professors I know are profoundly socially maladjusted people, and it has fuck-all to do with the gap between their educations and anyone they might condescend to talk to. They go into what is largely a profoundly solitary profession because that’s what they do best.

Don’t get me wrong: I believe in education. Look at me! I’m doing it! I’m being educated! I don’t know how to stop! But yesterday, for example, when two guys came to see if my roof needed replacing, it never occurred to me that because of My Higher Education, I might not be able to shoot the shit about the weather. And it troubles me that there is any notion - from within higher education or outside it - that this should be difficult because of what I’ve learned and the culture in which I’ve learned it. All I can imagine is that PhDs from posh unis who feel uncomfortable chatting with the many-headed probably felt that way before they got to the posh uni.

I have a friend who gave up what would surely have been a remarkable academic career in English Lit - she was almost finished her PhD - to be a housewife and a mom. Does this mean she threw her education away, do you think? I have another friend who holds an MA in Political Science. She spent three years eyeballs-deep in HIV/AIDS research, and now she’s managing a gift shop. My uncle was shortlisted for a Rhodes Scholarship; he tossed that in to be a carpenter. Did they throw away education? Set fire to all that money?

Now, the author of this article is telling you precisely this: that there is no moral difference between a Yale-educated politician or professor and a carpenter. Or a housewife. If you read the whole article, you’ll see it’s an indictment of the system: the kids just get spoiled. They have a sense of entitlement forced upon them, a sense that they’re better than everyone else. And it seems they just can’t help absorbing that message.

(Because, you know, they got into the Ivy League, which naturally means they’re idiots.)

Good for him for acknowledging what a false premise that is (although of course, as he points out, it isn’t: the Ivy Leaguers do get better treatment than the rest of the world). But he paints the system of elite education as an abusive parent, blaming the institutions and not the individuals.

Maybe it’s because I’m Canadian. Maybe it’s because I’m Albertan. Maybe it’s because most of my closest friends - and the people I respect the most - are people who opted against higher (or at least postgraduate) education. But I just don’t get it. I’m at the University of Cambridge. At the end of this degree - should that ever come - I will arguably be a leading authority on Anglo-Jewish midwifery. So when does my sense of entitlement kick in? When do I get to start ordering off-menu? When do I get the fucking affidavit telling me I’m better than everyone else?

Don’t think the rhetoric at Cambridge isn’t piled just as sky-high as at a place like Yale or Columbia. We’re centuries older, after all. We lift our noses at you. I just don’t happen to imbibe it, because I’m not a total tool. I’m older, and I’m a foreigner, but that matters less than you think.

What baffles me is how many postgrad-educated people I know - and know of - who spend hours and days of their lives that they’ll never get back navel-gazing about this shit, about how they should treat the goddamn plebs. How they should fashion their conversation. Here is a truth that I’ve hit on any number of times over the course of my research: if the way I’m learning is how experts become expert, I’m never going to believe anything I read ever again. Not because I doubt the integrity of my scholarship, but because I haven’t found that low door in the wall yet: I’m still faking it, because I haven’t made it yet.

My MA supervisor promised me that during my thesis defence, there would come a moment when I knew it was over, knew that I’d passed. He was wrong. That moment never came. Not only do I not believe I’m morally superior to the average bear, I don’t necessarily think I’m smarter, either. I think this much: that I know a lot about one relatively small thing because that is where my fascination and my imagination took me. It doesn’t make me better than you. Am I the exception? Or have I joined a league of antisocial, entitled assholes who blindly believe everything they’re told?

(Oh my, this has turned into a rant.)

I want to make it clear that I don’t hold anything against the author of this article; it hit a nerve, but there’s wisdom to it. I’m just sick of the gilded-cage arguments; I’m sick of educated people publicly congratulating themselves because they managed to carry on a three-minute conversation with a locksmith or helped to hoist a two-by-four. The assumption is that there is somehow a skill in descending to the locksmith’s level; this is what I can’t stand. Any academic who’s seen eyes glaze over when telling people what they ‘do’ should be flattered that the locksmith let the conversation carry on even that long.

I suppose this is a class thing. Where I come from, the world is run by oil barons with ninth-grade educations. Maybe that’s the one gift that Fort McMurray, Alberta, the last place God made, has bestowed on me. The people who are better than us aren’t the ones with the elite educations; they’re the ones who saw a well, tapped it, and went for a beer.

Till next time, &c &c.

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

No related posts.

The major problem is that the romance begins in 1576. And so I think of falling in love (I have some experience with this). I think of this: screaming down Groat Road behind the wheel of prospective boyfriend’s car circa 1998 listening to Everclear’s timeless ‘Santa Monica’ and hearing a quiet voice from the passenger seat saying, ‘I’m fine with you driving my car, but we don’t know each other all that well - I just gotta say [bracing for impact] that if something happens you’re paying for it…’

(Reader, I married him.)

I think of coffee shops and sharing Italian sodas and inept chess matches. I think of watching Crimes and Misdemeanors and sharing a blanket on a couch. I think of charged instant messaging. I think of that moment on The Office in the second season when Jim and Pam share an iPod for one beautiful moment when all is clear: they are in love.

I think of awkward moments with condoms. (Sorry, Mom.)

Now, I haven’t been on the market since 1998. There have been fraught moments since then, charged moments, but nothing substantial. I lit my follow-spot on the guy who let me drive his car and haven’t looked back. And I can’t imagine falling in love in the new millennium. Texting. Webcams. Skype. As Liz Lemon says, there are so many more ways for a guy to not call you now!

All the same, I can’t divorce even my very first feelings of real love from technology and modernity. Theatres, televisions, telephones, chat, email, cars. Italian sodas, even. Meeting at the Choklit Shoppe. I know that the core of love itself is a timeless thing, and I know a lot about history, but I keep trying to imagine how two people met and fell in love in 1576. Was it all just making eyes and meeting in alcoves?

In my first novel, I wrote a scene in which the boy is trying very ineffectually to relace the stays of the girl. This was lifted directly from life, from the first time a guy tried first to take my bra off, and then to put it back on. (Sorry, Mom.) That was easy; that could transpose. I have a lot more trouble taking contemporary forms of entertainment - jousts, bear-baiting - and turning them into venues for romance.

I imagine the answer is to hitch my camera to the shoulder of my protagonist and see - really see - what she sees. To understand deeply and completely that she doesn’t have a mobile in her pocket, that she doesn’t have video games distracting her. That messages took weeks. And understand, most importantly, not what was different about sixteenth-century lovin’, but what was the same.

It’s all just an excuse anyway: I’m shit at writing romance. How I ever managed to beguile anyone is a mystery to me; I have absolutely zero frame of reference to work from.

And now: back to it.

Till next time, &c &c.

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

No related posts.

Man: other living things. Now, to business.

One of the great things about coming from a broken home - well, my broken home - is that you get to examine both parents’ book collections on their own. If they were still married, who knows: the books might be piled willy-nilly and you might not know whose was whose. Both my parents have remarried, but for whatever reason neither of my stepparents has any real interest in reading, nor in collecting books. So my parents’ collections stand alone.

This much I remember from my childhood. D.H. Lawrence. Alice Munro. Salman Rushdie. Marcel Proust. John Fowles. Margaret Laurence (big one). Anne Tyler. Anne Michaels. Margaret Atwood. A few Annes; a few Margarets. Not unlike the characters in my own historical novels.

The bookcases are wooden now, but that’s because my parents are bona fide middle class now. Back in the day, when they were shabby genteel, the books sat on two-by-fours held up by cinderblocks; they were artfully arranged in artfully concealed cardboard boxes. They piled up everywhere. Both my parents love books. I think that’s probably what kept them married for the entire twelve minutes they were married.

This was my first impression of reading. Books piled upon books. And it was about a lot more than reading - in fact, I don’t know if reading qua reading was the single most important feature of them. It was the way they made a room look. For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted a house with built-in bookcases, wall after wall filled with books. Is this because I’m an avid reader? Of course, but. It’s also because I love the look and smell of books. It’s the only aesthetic taste I’ve ever really developed. Soft furniture and hardwood floors and books.

My parents worshiped books; so, in turn, did I. It was my first real motivator for becoming a writer. This is deep-tissue stuff; it goes all the way back. I wanted to make more of what filled those rooms.

Whither iPad, world?

[Big fat NB: I am not Cnut trying to hold back the waves. I am not a reactionary about technology. Ebooks are here; digital publishing is here. I’m not going to sit in my basement with a stick and flint and cry about moveable type. That’s not what this is about.]

The first thing I saw in the iPad demonstration was an image of one of the bookshelves I so covet. An image on a nine-inch screen. You choose the book you want with your finger. God knows how many books this thing can hold. I was attracted to it at first because I find now that I’m attracted to shiny things on spec: I have a laptop; I have a netbook; I have an iPod Touch. I love them all, each in different ways. They give and give and ask very little of me.

But I have two observations about the iPad. The first is in the form of a friend’s tweet: ‘I’m holding out for the Mini iPad.’ Basically: I’m happy with my Touch. I don’t really know what an iPad offers that I can’t get from my Touch. I’m probably woefully ignorant. The second is this: I’m sorry, dudes, but it looks like a Speak n’ Spell. What’s the point in an almost-life-sized QWERTY keyboard if there’s no way to type?

The bigger question is this. There’s no denying that ebooks are the Way of the Future, even if the Future is going to take a long time to get here. I decided I wanted to be a writer in, what, 1984. Long time ago. Finally I put all my ducks in a row; finally I pull my shit together and have something to offer, and two things happen: the bottom falls out of the market, and there are iPads. This means it’s harder than it’s ever been to sell a book; there’s more competition than there’s ever been; and it’s very possible that when I do make my bones and publish for the first time, it’s gonna be read on an iPad. Not filling up shelves held up by cinderblocks.

This might sound like whining, but it’s a small-scale big deal for me: if my first real desire to write came from existing in those rooms full of books, what do I do with a future where there are no more rooms full of books?

Well, first I take a deep breath. Books aren’t going anywhere yet. In my lifetime, my dream of walls of bookcases and hardwood floors and soft furniture is entirely within reach (if I ever get a job). If it all goes digital after I die, well, I’ll be dead.

Second, I realise this wonderful thing: it doesn’t stop me wanting to write; it doesn’t actually stop me wanting to be read. There is, for example, no bound paper version of this blog, which I have loved and given to and returned to for (holy shit) eight years now. And yet here I am. You can’t be a reactionary about technology and rely on it as much as I do.

Third, and the revelation stops here: I don’t want an iPad. I just don’t. I never wanted a Kindle and I don’t want this. This is a relief: one less thing to covet. We could all do with coveting just a bit less. I don’t want a Mazarati and I don’t want an iPad. All is right with the universe.

I thought I could fold this into some other thoughts I’m having - mostly about advances - but there’s no comfortable segue, this has gone on long enough, and I have index cards to scribble on (almost typed ’struggle on’, which is more apt). So more on that later. Happy weekend, all; shabbat shalom.

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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You may have noticed that your hostess is going through a small-scale existential crisis. The words aren’t flying onto the page; Sarah feels imbued neither with purpose nor with conviction. It’s a tough place to be.

Today, in the throes of attempting to look everywhere except at either my computer screen or the ream of papers surrounding me, I saw an old friend: high up on my mom’s book case was my Master’s thesis, sitting in proud red leatherette under a half-inch of dust. I pulled it down. ‘Have you read this?’ I asked my mom. She admitted that she hadn’t, but was quick to reassure me that she was very proud of me and that she was sure it was very good.

Now, if you want to keep your friends, pretty much the last thing you should do is force your Master’s thesis on them. I’m always looking round the corner for the person who found this tome a mesmerising page-turner, but I’m not holding my breath. In short: I don’t bear a grudge against my mom (although, you know, it was dedicated to her, and she hadn’t read the dedication either).

The thesis is very good. Did I think this while I was writing it? No. Did I think this when I defended it to a committee of my superiors? No. Did I think this when I saw it bound in red leatherette for the first time? No. It took a long time to see it for what it was, and a lot of that time was taken up in forgetting. Forgetting the bits that I glossed over. Forgetting the bits that were finished not because I’d said all I had to say, but because I was too tired of looking at the page, or had indigestion, or went out drinking. Forgetting all the rough edges.

Given some objective distance – viz. a lot of time spent not looking at it or thinking about it – I can return to the old MA thesis and thumb through it with a fond eye, not only giving the Sarah of 2006-7 a reassuring pat on the back, but seeing, as a historian, that it’s a fine piece of scholarship.

It was something I finished. It was something I thought I couldn’t do, and yet here it is, in living colour.

It feels good to have things done. I’m sitting here in amongst a pile of papers and books and, well, knitting stuff, and all of it (except the knitting stuff) is related either to a presentation I have to give next week or a scholarship application that I have to send, like, last week. All of it’s sitting here on point, tools to help me through this massive quagmire of writing and research that, for reasons passing understanding, I decided I wanted for myself.

But the thesis is here too.

It’s bound; there’s nothing I can do to it. If I read it closely enough, I can remember little tiffs with my supervisor, points of contention during the defence, but I read the words and think: I won. It’s finished.

It’s about the Elizabethan privy chamber. It has nothing to do with Anglo-Jewish women or medical ethics or hospital minutes. It’s not on point – and it is. Because I’m sitting here looking at it, knowing that this thing that I was convinced was beyond me is complete and well-done. It reminds me that I did it once, and it riles up the tiny voice in the back of my head telling me I can do it again.

The only thing that could help more is having my name on a novel sitting next to it. But one thing at a time.

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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