sarah eve kelly

In between bouts of banging my head against the wall, I do a lot of thinking about education, what it means, and how it defines people. Something of myself, she says pretentiously: I’m in the creamy middle of a PhD at Cambridge. I do history. This will be my third degree (heh).

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.

The ever-wonderful Editorial Anonymous posted this week about the fact that editors and agents shouldn’t be able to dash writers’ dreams by rejecting their manuscripts, the argument being two-fold: first, that it’s your manuscript, not all your dreams, that they’re rejecting; and second, that you have to come into this business armed with a better-than-average dose of confidence and thick skin if you expect to get anywhere. The premise is true, and the arguments are dead-on. Someone in the comment thread even likened the entire effort towards publication to auditioning for American Idol: you might feel a little sad for the brutal critiques these contestants are sometimes subjected to, but you must recall that they entered the arena with their eyes open - or, at the very least, should have done.

The only problem I have with this post is that it preaches to the choir. The people who agree are going to agree, and vociferously; and the people who don’t - the people who give all aspiring writers a bad name - are going to fight back with unintelligibly angry rants and manifestos about Talent and Callings and Publishing’s Missed Opportunities.

I was alerted to this post, as to so many things, by Twitter. The tweet called attention not so much to the post itself, but to the ‘defensive, whiny’ nature of the comments. I clicked on the link bracing myself for the kind of mountain of offal that makes all writers look bad, but what I found was this: agreement. From writers. Respect; professionalism. And down at the bottom of the thread, some disgruntled bint opining on how publishing’s got it all wrong, how the wrong people are rejected, and how the industry doesn’t entreat the people who write celebrity memoirs to work hard and play by the rules. There were about forty comments at this stage, and exactly two of them could be classified as ‘whiny’ or ‘defensive’. I pointed this out on Twitter - and after a little back-and-forth that did not raise my heart rate by a single beat - was summarily told to ‘chill the eff out’.

I believe in the rules. Agents and editors, hear me: I’m one of the good guys. I worked hard to get an agent, I take rejection well, and I’m learning to work harder and to work better. My only point was that I’m not the only one. The web has largely succeeded in pulling writers into line, and - for the good guys, anyway - has perhaps even gone too far: most of the writers I know live in terror of offending their agents, and think the most arbitrary and tiny acts could reduce their fitness for publication. These are people who queried properly and respectfully, who followed guidelines, who are stoic, hard workers - and (she says in a tiny voice) are enormously talented. Can we all be published if we do everything right? Of course not; nothing works that way. It’s a painful lesson, but it’s one we know. And we’re perfectly aware too that agents and editors are professionals like anyone else - there are good ones and bad ones - and only the bad ones are asking for unquestioning worship and deference. We know all that.

So I can only imagine that professionals in publishing are perpetually moved to write opuses convincing writers to behave because they see things in their inboxes that we don’t see. There are a lot of idiots out there, and guess what: none of them is going to read an agent’s or editor’s reasoned argument that things are the way they are for a reason. And if they do read, it’ll only be to spit venom in the comment threads and (I say it again) make the rest of us look bad. These are people who are beyond argument, and it’s not worth any professional’s time to attempt to engage them.

Over the past couple of years I’ve started to exist in a world (an online one, anyway) that understands how publishing works: that there are ‘good’ passes and ‘bad’ passes - that being good enough doesn’t mean you get a million-dollar advance, but that you’ll get a certain kind of rejection: the kind that invites further work, the kind that takes a moment to tell you what doesn’t work about your novel. You know who doesn’t know that? Our families. Try saying ‘I got a good pass’ to your mother or your best friend. All they hear is a door slamming; a rejection means that you’re not good enough, full stop. It means ‘She says she’s a writer but she’s just titting around.’ Anyone who’s serious about writing has to contend with this level of completely understandable ignorance in their personal lives all the time, unless he or she makes a resolution (as so many do) not to talk about writing at all. The ridicule to which you open yourself up when you decide to pursue writing professionally - not from agents, not from editors, but from your family and friends - is such that you’d have to be totally crazy to do it, or very serious, very committed, and ready for anything.

(NB: I’ve been ridiculously lucky with my family and friends, who are willing to listen and to understand how this works. But anyone who’s not family, or not a close friend, thinks (at best) that I’m giving myself airs or (at worst) that I’m a criminal idiot.)

The best part of Editorial Anonymous’s post was at the end: ‘We are not your fairy godmothers; we are your colleagues.’ Once again, the stoic, hard-working, talented writers understand this and don’t need to be told. The dissidents will dissent: it’s what they do. And so: if we’re colleagues, we’re colleagues, right? Everyone in publishing deals with rejection, not just writers. Agents pitch and get rejected. Editors take a beloved manuscript to acquisitions and get rejected. Hell, a book gets sold and printed and gets rejected by the public. This happens all the time. Most of the time the rejection is the right decision; sometimes it’s the wrong decision. It’s never not heartbreaking. But we are, as the post says, colleagues. This doesn’t just mean that writers have to take criticism and rejection with grace. It means that well-intentioned writers who play the game and follow the rules have to be treated with respect, whether or not they’re being rejected.

Speaking for myself, I’ve always been respectfully dealt with in a rejection situation - agents and editors have been kind and encouraging, some of them well beyond their remit. I don’t think it’s that system - speaking from my own experience - that’s problematic. What’s problematic is all these ‘colleagues’ mouthing off at the slightest provocation about how unprofessional other people in the industry are: editors about agents; agents about writers; writers about everyone. It gets up my nose to open Twitter and find another lambast against my lack of professionalism, and that of my writer-colleagues. It’s true that one manuscript isn’t the sum total of our dreams, and that no one can crush our dreams but us. But we work so hard - we open ourselves up to so much ridicule - and although we must take rejection and criticism in the spirit in which it was intended, there are few other professions which force its aspirants to eat so much shit when they haven’t done anything wrong. When, in fact, the only reason that they’re bothering to read these abuses is because they’re doing everything right.

No writer is asking for a parade. I’m certainly not. I just want the flow of vitriol to slow a little bit. You don’t spank every bloody kid on the block because one snuck into the cookie jar or broke the hi-fi. Go after the idiots all you want, but cut the rest of us a little fucking slack, all right? With all sincere respect.

Till next time, &c &c.

If I had lived my life pro forma, I would be twenty-six years old right now. (Four years for a BA, two for an MA, three for a PhD.) That’s four years of my adult life unaccounted for.

Some people get it right out the gate. They know what they want at the age of seventeen and pursue it. I’ve known only one thing for as long as I’ve been sentient: that I want to write stories. I didn’t care how; I didn’t learn how until fairly recently. That was what I wanted, and I believed that university was immaterial to it. I went to university because that’s what people did; it was what my family expected, and I didn’t have any other plans. Looking back on my seventeen-year-old self, I’m gobsmacked that I got the application in, to the one university I solicited, on time and intact.

My undergrad was not a pristine thing. I didn’t care about school for the first two years, and when I started to care, I had a lot of ground to make up. Those first years still sit like ugly toads on my transcript: they’re there forever.

I don’t mind. In fact, I’m glad.

(My parents might continue to feel differently.)

In my twelve-odd years of adulthood, if not maturity, I have learned this: failure is incredibly important. It might be, in fact, the most important rite there is: real, high-stakes failure. Setting a goal and failing to meet it. It makes self-scrutiny possible, honest critical reflection that has nothing to do with Death and running your fingers through your hair. It brings you closer to understanding yourself, and is the only thing that makes it possible for you to understand others.

In these early stages of the professional writing life, I’ve learned something else that I wasn’t able to properly imbibe when it happened in junior high school: rejection is also important, developing the ability to believe in yourself when others don’t.

Brief History of Me: I grew up in the ‘gifted’ category; I was sent into special programs; I read and wrote early (though walked and talked late); I was sent into kindergarten a year early, just a bit younger than all the others, and my mother believes I’ve been trying to reclaim that year ever since. As I grew older, something started to happen to my ‘gift’ - I distracted more easily, I cared less. I got out of high school with an 87% GPA because I was ‘graded on potential’, a fact that did me no favours in university.

I was six years finishing my BA; it convinced me that School Is Not For Me. Mike and I spent ten months in Europe and I had a plan: we would return to Canada, I would take an admin job, and I would write at night. I loved writing because I wasn’t really doing it; I hadn’t settled into a routine yet. I thought the Muse would be at my shoulder if I only had the time. I spent a year trying this out.

What’s the lamest reason you can think of to enter an MA program? How about ‘My boyfriend’s doing it?’ Well, that’s why I did it. The novel was nowhere, my job was OK but I couldn’t see myself growing old in it; I felt like the teenaged Stephen Fry: My whole life stretched out gloriously behind me. I was twenty-five. Mike wanted an MA, so I got one too.

That degree changed the entire course of my life. I went into it a mouse and came out of it a lion. There was my thesis, bound in red leatherette. I could do anything.

I got a degree; I got married; I left Canada. I finished my novel, got it represented, and came here, to Cambridge. I was twenty-nine when I arrived and I’m thirty now.

I met a woman during my first week here who was just starting the last year of her PhD. I asked her what she planned to do afterwards, and she said she didn’t know - she would only be twenty-six, and didn’t want to commit herself to a lifetime in one job. When I finish my PhD (sacrificial slippers forthcoming to ensure this happens), I will be thirty-two. And here’s what’s not in the offing: children. Home ownership. Lawnmowers.

We don’t even know where we want to be, let alone when, or how.

I wouldn’t cast the four years of my adult life during which I wasn’t in school as a monolith failure for the sake of an analogy; they weren’t. I was on the garden path, not the other one. I did fail, at most everything you can imagine. Whenever I did, it’s because I thought something would be easy, and it never is; the things you love are, by definition, difficult, challenging. When I was up for a challenge, I was ready to experience love properly, not just for people, but for vocation.

I write this now because I am being challenged by what I love (if ‘being kicked in the teeth’ is suitably a ‘challenge’). This is harder than I thought it would be. Thankfully, I know what failure is: not something you struggle against, but something you buckle beneath. As long as I’m still struggling, I haven’t failed. As someone had it, ‘It will be OK in the end. If it’s not OK, it’s not the end.’

I don’t regret not having lived a linear life. If I had, any strong breeze might have felled me. It pays to put a foot wrong every once in a while. (And, of course, that’s why I did it in the first place. All that drinking in undergrad was calculated to make me strong and bind me to glory.)

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

Herewith: an orderly post about publishing, spewing forth from my lovely shiny new laptop which was gotten at a discount.

When I say ‘these days’, I’m not talking about publishing being in the sinkhole; I’m talking, rather, about our particular Gen X-Y group of writers, and what our legacy will be in fifty years’ time, and further on. (Yes, this does qualify as Muttering About Destiny, so feel free to smack me.)

I’m writing to you from Glen Cove, New York, as I’ve been reined in by the family to spend some quality time with the Best Brother Ever while my mother and stepfather are out of state. Hanging out at my mom’s house is, now I’m an adult, a constant exercise in comparing my household to hers (what a horridly anti-feminist sentiment, but we’re still there, girls, we really are), and, this time, comparing my book collection to hers. Looking over my shoulder, a cursory glance at her bookcases gives me Carol Shields, Alice Munro, Anne Tyler, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Miriam Toews. Also a copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes that I left the last time I was here.

As those of you who are regular readers - or have spoken with me for half an hour at a stretch - will know, I have a complex about Margaret Atwood. I have no idea what it’s about. It is, at least in part, about the number of interesting photos taken of her over the years: she’s got this small-titted writerliness about her, a crackling tininess that I find terrifying. There’s also the voice. People have made fun of her voice for its deadpan, monotone quality, but in that tone I hear confidence, an I-don’t-write-for-you-ness. I want that, and she seems to have had it from the beginning.

I have confessed here, after all, that I write to be read.

The problem I have with The Divine Ms A, though - the principal problem - is that I can’t get next to most of her novels. I was raised to believe that reading Margaret Atwood was not an option, but an imperative. I shall likely feed the same codswallop to my own children about John Irving, when the time comes. (My Atwood indoctrination began when I was about four.) I know, objectively, that the novels are very good, very worthy, but I can’t sink in to them. There: I said it (again).

Still, I can’t just dismiss her and move on.

Every night here in Glen Cove, I devote the fifteen minutes before attempting sleep to reading a few pages of a book called The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out by Rosemary Sullivan, a professor at the University of Toronto and a serial literary biographer. It is masochism; I am very good at this. From this book I learn what I already knew: that in the 1960s, Canadian publishing was a vast wilderness, occupied by about four white men. From this decade, this generation, rose Margaret Atwood and her various consoeurs, and by the end of the 1970s, Canadian publishing was a teeming, pulsating culture all its own. In other words, Margaret Atwood had a job to do. She had to change the landscape, and she did that.

Listen:

In my mind’s eye I see Margaret Atwood standing on a bridge: the woods are at her back, the city is before her, and she commands both worlds. There are bodies under the water, trolls under the bridge. This is, of course, an absurd image I have invented, but it conjures up a vision of a woman who, out of years of training and willed attention, has claimed deep mythological roots for her writing. She speaks with an incisiveness in which the pleasure of provocation is implicit. She takes herself very straightforwardly. She is a writer.

This from a book whose subject asserts that writing is a state of doing, not a state of being. From this one paragraph, I glean that in Canadiana, the women’s market has been cornered. Finished. Nothing left to see here. You see why I’m frightened.

As difficult as it is to get published today (when I imagine the 1960s in Canada I imagine poor-quality Xeroxes bound with paperclips - perhaps hemp twine - crisscrossing the country by rail), there are more books now than there ever have been. What it must take to get noticed in such a sea!

The challenge to be a voice that stands out is not only an artistic one - although that is the primary challenge, despite the whining of the many-headed. I might be the only person alive who feels sorry for JK Rowling, even for someone like Stephenie Meyer, because what could they write now that would be taken seriously, that would be bought and read for more than morbid, fingertip curiosity?

Even if you find your voice, even if it stands out, even if people love it, there are quagmires.

What haunts me about Margaret Atwood is that now that she’s been read, loved, respected these past forty years and more, it is all the more difficult to find a corner of writing that hasn’t yet been claimed. Another terrifying sentence from The Red Shoes:

… I am fascinated by the mystery of artistic confidence. Where does the strength come from to believe in yourself as a writer?

Wait, for the sake of fuck: you have to believe in yourself? You have to have ‘artistic confidence’? I’ve finished a novel: does that mean I believe in myself? Well, I suppose it does. I believe that my seven-year-old self wanted to write novels for grown-ups. In my early adulthood, I believed I held tremendous insight into the human condition. Now, I’ve written what I most feared in my Atwood-driven childhood: a plot-driven novel. No successful, slightly-too-thin, middle-aged women falling back on their beds in a blouse and garters to contemplate the ceiling, unhappy marriages, and The State of Things. My mantra used to be I’m not old enough, I don’t know enough, but I can’t hide behind that now.

The problem is that I haven’t created a mythology for myself yet. That’s next. Or another novel.

What does it take to be an individual in this flood? What does it take to be both worthy and noticed? I suppose I ought to concentrate on the worthy and leave the noticed for later. Still.

This dovetails nicely with my next post, which will be existential and will involve knitting. So much for orderly.

Till next time, &c &c.

… or art for history’s sake?

On This Spot, I have provided deservedly derisive reviews of the brainchildren of writer Michael Hirst and director Shekhar Kapur, Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. I hated the 1998 film, hated it not only as a scholar (and I was only a scholar in the very meanest sense of the term back then) but as a sentient human being, that others might think to trick me into thinking that Elizabeth represented the truth, or even a fiction that was more captivating than the truth.

The Golden Age got decidedly worse reviews, oddly, because I thought it was better. Indefensible for the most part but sensorily better, a marginally superior screencap of that time and that court.

I remember directing right-thinking people to Elizabeth R, the 1971 BBC masterpiece starring Glenda Jackson. After having seen the first season of The Tudors (also a Michael Hirst accomplishment), I similarly pointed everyone I could find to Elizabeth R’s predecessor, the BBC’s 1969 six-hour production The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Caught in the knot between repacing my novel (about the destruction of Anne Boleyn, found in magnificently erroneous technicolor on Showtime this past spring) and culling together sources for my dissertation (about the spectacle of pregnancy in early modern England - two subjects not terribly far apart), I don’t know if I could now as earnestly ask anyone to watch the flourescent-lit and badly-fit BBC productions over the salacity and car-crashery of The Tudors.

Part of this shift in opinion is scholarly - historiography has entered a post-Eltonian age, and many of the truths espoused in the 1969 and 1971 productions are now being called into question. But that’s not the whole reason, or even the real one: it’s a fig leaf I hide behind because in two years I’m going to be Dr Sarah, if all goes well. The real reason is that art serves history just as history serves art - anyone who doesn’t believe this is ignorant or delusional - and, whatever I might say about Michael Hirst (and I have a lot to say), The Tudors is art.

There are a few different kinds of people who are drawn to history through the medium of film, television, or novels, and there are a few different stages they go through.

1. Wow, history is exciting! Look at all that blood! Look at those tans! I wish I could eat by candlelight and wear pretty dresses (or pretty breeches, as the case may be).

2. Hey, that doesn’t seem to be what really happened, but Natalie Dormer’s still pretty hot.

3. Wow, that’s really not what happened.

4. I can’t believe this fraud is being perpetuated on the people! I’m going to write a book to set the record straight.

5. Hey, how did I get interested in this in the first place?

OK, so it’s not the Five Stages of Grief. It’s not even applicable to the vast majority of people who are attracted to historical fiction. All right, fine, it’s just me. And I only reached Stage Five about a month ago.

I first became interested in early modern English history because of a 1986 movie starring Helena Bonham Carter and Cary Elwes called Lady Jane. It was about Jane Grey, and man, was it a barnburner, and man, was it ever wild, wild fiction. I was fourteen (not in 1986 - I watched the movie in a friend’s basement in 1993). When I reached Stage Three above, I denounced the film high and low, claimed that my historical interest was piqued in some book or other, and tried to develop a reputation for myself as a Serious Person. I later managed to maintain the facade of Serious whilst still getting my flashy movie fix: watching The Tudors, I yelled at the television whenever something wrong or simply incomprehensible happened - friends claim to have enjoyed my ex tempore annotations.

I still hate Elizabeth, mind, because it’s so jumpy and arbitrary as to be completely unenjoyable even on a sensory level.

There are now three days between me and my thirtieth birthday. The time has come to face some Inconvenient Truths. If I get to be Dr Sarah, it will be because a friend made me watch Lady Jane in 1993. I don’t care that Guildford Dudley was, in fact, a whiny little bitch constantly hiding behind his mother’s skirts; I don’t care that Jane Grey was about as bigoted and short-sighted a Puritan as existed in the sixteenth century (although, really, poor girl). Admit it, admit it, admit it: the movie was well done. It took the fragile skein of a love story and turned it into a bona fide love story, which is what all good historical fiction can do: it shapes the boundaries of what might have been possible. It sparks interest. It turns history into a story - you can catch up on the facts later.

I’ve discovered that what I truly object to is this refashioning being badly or sloppily done. Elizabeth was hopelessly slipshod, and it is only amongst the worst of a whole pantheon of shitty movies exploiting the preconception of bygone gore to ratchet up box office returns. It failed entirely to consult the boundaries of the possible.

People forget that most of history is not written down (believe me, when you’re trying to gather sources for something as nebulous as pregnancy, you remember this in a hurry). History is never finished: historical study is constant salvos of interpretation and anyone with any talent can take the possibilities of a given historical situation and imbue it with flash and modern meaning, exploiting history’s twin powers of continuity and change to hold a mirror up to who we really are. The Lion in Winter is not a study of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, not a treatise on the Angevin succession crisis: it’s a wickedly tragicomic rendering of a dysfunctional family. Do we have those now, or is that strictly a 12th-century thing? And yet, although history tells us that there was no Christmas gathering at Chinon in 1183, what James Goldman (older, horribly-overlooked brother of William, of The Princess Bride fame) has written is a perfect rendering of the political and familial mise-en-scene of that time. Was it historically accurate in every particular? Certainly not (dudes, it had a Christmas tree). Does that matter? Not really.

When my agent told me that I was writing historical fiction, not history, and that I’d better start thinking that way in a hurry, my first reaction was fear: didn’t she understand? Doesn’t she know that I want to wrest this ersatz, shiteous “truth” that other authors have been throwing around about Anne Boleyn for centuries and set the record straight? After some thought I realized I was thinking like a zealot, like an evangelical, and started looking again to the boundaries of the possible, to shaping what is historically real and meaningful into something that could move my twenty-first-century compatriots and make them think about the world we live in. I told myself: it is OK to have a historical imagination. In fact, it’s the first requirement of any historical novelist - or any historian, for that matter.

I think Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is pretty boring as Henry VIII, but you won’t hear me objecting to The Tudors again (although really, Gabrielle Anwar’s tan is a bit much). It fiddles with dates and amalgamates sisters and invents uncles and posits a Puritan ascendancy at least twenty years before it actually happened, but it’s good TV. It gets people interested - maybe in 15 years, some 29-year-old having an existential crisis will be hopelessly mired in a doctorate degree because of it.

Besides, who’s to say that The Tudors is wrong? Or Elizabeth R? Or The Fidelity Trial, for that matter? History is never finished: no one version of events is ever going to be irrefutably right.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

Not enough? Find Sarah’s entire weblog archive here.

I haven’t been through this in a while: it’s two in the morning and I’ve decided that I’ve reached my surfeit of academic greatness. Am therefore shutting the brain down and turning it to other pursuits. After I’m done here, it’ll either be The Life of Mammals or Speer und Er, just to wind down.

The problem with the Speer movie is that it is all in German, with English subtitles, which means that I can’t do anything except watch it. I thought that if I watched it for long enough I would actually learn German, but nothing doing. All that’s happened is my recognition of some of the fundamental similarities between it and English (when I was first told in grade school that English was a Germanic language I giggled, but now I’m starting to understand).

My joy in both of these DVD sets - the Life of Mammalsone and the Speer one - is owed in great part to Colby, who bought me the former for my twenty-eighth birthday and enabled me to watch the latter on my humble HP Pavilion laptop. (OK, uncle: it’s not humble at all. It is a behemoth, and deeply aware of how wonderful it is.)

I’m moving, you know. (Did you not know? I’m moving.) Being an avid collector of things both noisy and shiny, I’ve been aware for a while that my computer has a DVD player that is locked on Region 1 (the US and Canada). Locked on Region 1, she says! Whatever could she mean? Well, the answer hides the reason that for the first time in a while, I’m lashing out against Big Corporation X. You probably know that the world is divided into eight DVD regions, and I’m convinced that this fascist conspiracy was developed entirely to stop cheap Mexican DVDs entering the US. But less of that. Back to moving: when I’m in the UK I will be in a Region 2 (Europe) world, which means that I could spend days at the Virgin Megastore completely impotent (heh), because their DVDs will not play on my laptop.

I’ve seen this problem overcome before, and didn’t think much of it until about six weeks ago when I was watching the History Channel. (Why, oh why is CSI:NY on the History Channel? The person who can answer this question for me is probably also capable of unveiling the face of God.) Speer und Er, a docudrama about the career of Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and Third Reich armaments minister from 1942-45, was playing on Wednesday nights. Ever since I read a biography of Speer in Vienna some three and a half years ago, I’ve been fascinated by him, and this series, which is half straightforward movie and half interviews with his children, colleagues, and first biographers, grabbed me right from the first. It’s an excellent series: go watch it.

Oh, wait, you can’t. Not unless you speak fluent German and/or live in Hong Kong. Try finding this DVD, I dare you. You can go to the Deutsch Amazon site, which will sell it to you without the subtitles, or you can order it from HMV Hong Kong, which has subtitles but only sells Region 3 DVDs.

When I found it on the HMV HK site I did a little hurrah dance: after all, I was planning on getting region-free software for my laptop anyway, so I could continue accumulating DVDs in the UK, so what’s Region 3? Nothing, darling. So I figured out what Hong Kong dollars were worth and bunged the order in for the very reasonable price of forty-odd of our own Canadian dollars.

The shipment arrived quickly, and I was surprised by that. I went to work trying to find region-unlocking software, and went through - no joke - six free-trial downloads that did nothing but play the audio while locking the DVD on the menu screen. I felt, needless to say, like an absolute ass for wasting my money, and considered for some time that perhaps the DVDs themselves were faulty.

You probably know how frustrating this is, having a simple destination elude you. I had better things to do, I can tell you, and by the time I was ready to throw the whole contraption out the window I wasn’t remotely interested in watching the movie any longer: I wanted to conquer the fucking thing, that was all. All these promises, for the low-low price of $39.95, and nothing was working.

Then Colby came over for House night. We watch it together every Tuesday night, you see. And hockey, if there is any, but not recently, because it makes us blubber like little girls. In any case I laid the problem before him. He didn’t seem terribly interested but decided to take a five-minute bash at it. Five minutes later, Speer und Er was playing faultlessly on this very machine.

Context: I had been working on this for two days, probably seven hours altogether making incoherent noises and shouting “Fuck the police!”

For anyone who is interested to know, or has suffered as I have suffered: the answer is in a completely free gizbob called the VLC media player. It’s a beautiful thing. I’d be resentful (part of me wanted to shout “I loosened the cap! I loosened it!” - even though I hadn’t: the most I’d done was fill my computer with a bunch of garbage that’s probably going to come back and bite me in ninety days), but I’m too happy: the world of media retail is once again open to me, anywhere in the world. And the BBC (those fuckers, but that’s another matter) has just released The Life Collection, which I’m absolutely gagging for. Who knew that the defecation habits of the sloth would be of such colossal interest to me?

And now it’s quarter to three in the morning and I have completed this post, changed the laundry, answered the phone, and responded to three emails. I’m a productive cat, but bleeding Jesus, I have to be at work in six hours and I still need to wash my hair. You might think that I would sacrifice my DVD fix and just shower and head to bed. If so, you obviously don’t know me well enough.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.