Bycatch

According to popular wisdom, the weeks following the upgrade panel are generally marked by a loss of motivation and an increase in dissipation. So I'm going to assume that it's normal that I'd rather do literally anything other than work on the novel. I may have turned up to a blood draw appointment twenty minutes early last week because it cut into my habitual drafting time. Also people keep giving me their colds, and who can work when they've got a cold?

So I was procrastinating by poking through the library for secondary sources, as one does. One of the big differences between the sciences and the humanities is that research in most of the humanities has an incredibly long half life; some of the most useful work I've found on the history of censorship was written during the 60s. Since it's summer, I got to de-shelve everything that looked remotely pertinent to child development (for the novel) and expurgation (not for the novel) and spread it across one of the extremely large tables on the social sciences floor. And while thumbing through these stacks of books in search of anything helpful, I noticed something. 

I'd pulled several books that were written in the 1960s and 1970s. Generally, they discussed expurgation as a questionable practise that the Victorians had engaged in but whose time was thankfully over, and adolescents as individuals who needed accurate information about human biology and physiology in order to avoid making horrible uninformed mistakes that would lead to them being inmates of questionably run homes for unwed mothers. 

So when I picked up a book whose author made it clear that he thought expurgation in general and of the high school curriculum in particular was necessary for the sake of the children (high school meaning that these children are ~14 - 18 years old), I thought I'd unwittingly grabbed a book from the 1940s or so. Imagine my surprise to find it had a copyright date of 1993, which means that it's roughly the same age as my little brother. 

It would have been reasonable to assume that that book was a fluke, just one author with a culturally anachronistic view on censorship. Except that view was held in common by the authors of the other books in my heap that were published in the late 80s and through the 90s. I'd had the vague idea that there was a cultural trend towards conservatism around that time, but I'd never had such clear evidence - or seen how dramatic a trend it was. Without it, I probably wouldn't have my thesis topic, but I still wonder what the world would be like if we'd continued on the trajectory we seemed to be on in the 70s. 

By the by, I still haven't found a used copy of The Fault in our Stars, which either means that no one in Norwich or Reading has bought it, or that no one is sending it to their local charity shop. And I'm a bit hesitant to mark up one of the library copies (my school library is amazing), even with mechanical pencil, which rubs out quite well. But I'm sure there will be plenty of other things to raise my blood pressure until a used copy does come along, or until I cave and buy one off Amazon.