sleep won't come. it's past six in the morning and i haven't been able to sleep at all. my body clock's beginning to worry me. insomnia's not a pretty thing to catch if you're meant to be hitting the british library and various stacks of archival files once the weekend's over.
on the subject of archives and history, here's carolyn steedman, my favourite living historian, writing about them in her new book, dust:

There is the great, brown, slow-moving strandless river of Everything, and then there is its tiny flotsam that has landed up in the office you are at work at. Your craft is to conjure a social system from a nutmeg grater, and your competence in that was established long ago. Your anxiety is more precise, and more prosaic. It's about PT S2/1/1, which only arrived from the stacks that afternoon, and which you will never get through tomorrow.

This is very precise, and very accurate, and of course it's a delight to read. what she writes is the product of years of grubbing in archives, (literally) getting your hands dirty with the muck of the past, and i'm only at the beginning of my research - still, these lines do describe something of what i feel when confronted with a bound volume of delicate, brown, crumbly nineteenth-century manuscript paper that demands that i read it and do it justice, while time demands that i leave it aside and move on to something else. I felt this way in bombay all the time while looking through the archives - that there just wasn't enough time. So much of what historians do, which enters the world of monograph publication looking assured and finished and commanding, is actually insufferably messy, loose ends flapping like crows, mysteries left unexplored, tales untold - incompletion is pretty much history's condition of existence. Which is, of course, what can also make it such a thrill. (not all the time by any means, about half the time you find yourself fighting a losing battle with boredom. but comes a moment when things begin to fall in place, and then....)
all posts won't be this narcissistic. actually, what the hell...how does it matter if they are?? they will be! and good for them if that's the case!
eventful first morning of blogging....all mornings won't be this way. and that i can say with more certainty.