Yesterday I made the mistake of allowing myself once again to be devoured by a novel. In fact, I got so into it that I couldn’t get started with anything else until I finished it an hour ago. Reading like that makes me feel really incredibly super-indulgent and lazy. Guilty, even, as I know I have other things I need to do.

Getting sucked into a book only happens to me like that maybe once or twice a year, where I *have* to finish it. It’s like a crush. An all consuming obsession that leaves you constantly wondering ‘what’s going to happen?’ along with ‘where is the author taking this story?’ Thus was the case with Zadie Smith’s newest work, On Beauty.

I read White Teeth voraciously, too, in 2000. I started The Autograph Man, but never could quite give myself to it, even though I tried a second time after I saw her read at a bookstore one afternoon. Everytime I picked it up, Smith’s horrible rendition of a Southern American accent that day in the bookshop left me cold and reaching for the next book on the shelf.

But the transatlanticism of On Beauty gripped me as it went between Boston and London, two cities I unabashedly adore, as the story winded itself around the dangers of academia and the fire of the culture wars and ideosyncracies of being human.

Having spent a good portion of my adult life either studying or working in various universities and popping back and forth over the Atlantic, this book resonated. It reminded me of how insular and frail the walls of our universities really are once you step out of their hallowed gates. How if you’re not careful, you could very well find yourself a tenured professor with no idea how to use a stapler.

Equally frail are the walls between the liberal and conservative cultures, even though we often construct them tall and looming like prison fences. We’re all so stuck in our respective camps and digging our heels in, so incredibly unwilling to concede to the other side that continually we get nowhere- whether it’s academia vs ‘the real world’ or Republican vs Democrat or Tory vs Labour.

Somewhere in our quest to be cultured and refined we have forgotten the delicate intracacies that define being human. I am reminded of this when I talk to someone about my ideas on craft theory and the moment I mention the word “academic” their eyes glaze over. Or when I talk to someone academic and fail to use the right vocabulary words for the season. Or when I talk to an artist about craft or a crafter about art. It’s like our quest for individuality has done little except left us preaching to our own little choirs instead of being challenged or debating.

On Beauty reminded me just how much we create fiction in our own lives by clever self-definition. The fact that I can be whomever I want to be is both a blessing and a curse. And what is excessably irritating to me is how we got to this point in the first place. As I read stories from individuals regarding their disdain for elitism or hierarchy in current craft circles, I see little forward group action to combat it. I see many people who feel the same way but feel somewhat powerless to outwardly voice their opinion and a bit reticent to challenge their own creative output to something besides ‘what’s in for the out crowd,’ ie, what’s hip at the moment.

And the more I think about it the more annoyed that I get and wish I hadn’t finished On Beauty yet and was still somewhere deep in the novel thinking about the protective seal that we put around academia that is alienating- despite the perverse fact that what most academics want more than anything is public approval.

But somehow, like we manage to cockup everything, we have also managed to hyperpreserve higher education in a will to obtain the cream of the crop. We have become so compartmentalized and specialized that there is little left for the world at large. What happens when you would like to transcend the barriers between? As Smith touches in the novel, it’s not always the chosen ones who burn the brightest.

Somedays I fear that in my own elitism, I miss out on the work and input of some of the most glorious stars, because of my own self-crafted bubble, constructed on little else except books, yarn and hope.