A bit about censorship for Banned Book Week.

I realized on Monday that it was Banned Book Week, and, given the nature of my work, I decided that I really should put something out into the world related to censorship.

This realization was repeated on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and this morning. So it should be apparent what kind of week this was. And, I suppose, what kind of summer it's been. So before I procrastinate myself into next month, I'm going to say a few words on Textbook Content Guidelines.

To reduce the past year's research into a few bullet points:

1. Textbooks must conform to certain sets of content guidelines if they are going to be printed or bought by schools.

2. Some of the guidelines are written by school boards, others are written by the textbook publishers for internal use.

3. Though the impulse directing most of the guidelines is usually noble, the results are often ridiculous.

Not surprisingly, lists of guidelines tend to be a bit difficult to track down, especially the ones used by publishers to pick through their own textbooks before release. But the ones that I have tracked down, besides being key to my thesis, tend to make an amusing read when I can suppress the knowledge that they're shaping the education of U.S. children and teenagers.

So, with just a bit of commentary, here are some real textbook guidelines that have made my supervisor laugh with disbelief:

Topics to avoid on tests, because they might upset or distract the student:

Yachting

Witchcraft and witches, except in historical context in Massachusetts. (Because the Salem Witches were the only real witches, I suppose?)

Vacations in faraway places, ski trips, and other expensive items beyond the reach of all. (guess that means healthcare in the States is out.)

Unhealthy foods (because if they don't mention it, kids will stop eating cookies.)

Typhoons

Transportation

Thanksgiving

Sports

Serious car accidents (implying that funny car accidents are a-ok.)

Rock and roll music

Rats, mice, roaches, snakes, lice

Pumpkins

Native American religious references

Movies

Life on other planets, aliens and flying saucers

Brand-name products or corporate logos (would a band-aid, by any other name, still fall off in the bath?)

Aspirin or any other drug 

Birthday celebrations

Blizzards

Getting more specific, Foods to avoid in textbooks:

Bacon or salt pork

Butter, margarine, or lard

Coffee

Dougnuts

Gravy

Cakes, including Birthday cakes, or pies

Candy

Jams, Jellies, Preserves

Pickles

Salt

Sugar

Tea

Which, I suppose, rules out all of the dinner table scenes from the Little House on the Prarie books that are most of what I remember from being read them before bed when I was little. 

Moving right along, Topics to avoid in Textbooks:

Anthropomorphism in nonfiction

Conflict with authority (because if we don’t give students the idea, they’ll never find out that teenage rebellion is an option)

Controvercial people, such as Malcolm X (Along with all the other historical figures worth writing about)

Creation myths that present alternatives to Biblical creation 

Dialect (Everyone speaks the same, don't they?)

Ethnic groups in desperate situations 

Poor nutrition and eating habits

Stories about slavery

Unpunished transgression (life is always fair!)

Winter holidays

Under normal circumstances, I'd properly cite all of these, but their authors (the publishers) have made it clear that they do not want to be associated with the guidelines. That and all of my critical notes are up in Norwich and I'm down in Reading.

And since it's also roughly related to banned books: One-Star Book Reviews has spent the week posting the covers of banned books accompanied by the most outrageous challenges made to them. Check it out.

And now, kindly excuse me while I go spoon my hot water bottle and will my cold away.

Recalled to Life

Summer is a lot like a teenage boy asking you on a date: it inevitably promises more than it can deliver. At the start of the season I just knew that, with all of the distractions of the academic year and being freezing all the time out of the way, I would finally get around to writing some short fiction, that I'd get to do some serious digging in the British Library, that I'd probably fit in a few day trips, track down the rest of my primary sources, and maybe even finish a draft of the PhD novel.

It probably surprises no one but me that none of that happened.

Most of what happened was drafting for both sides of my degree and discovering that sources exist that I have to have but absolutely cannot find, sporadically interspersed with making a wedding happen. And then when it absolutely could not get any messier or any more hopeless, I flew back to the states to visit my family.

During undergrad, when I went home, it was clear that the timeline had progressed while I was elsewhere. Now, not so much. I return, now, to the same spot where I left off, to a moment or two after hugging my parents goodbye at the airport. Like stepping in and out of Narnia. My trips to the States stitch themselves together in a not unpleasant way - and since they are so short (and possibly also because I'm not allowed to drive over there any more) it feels like I haven't aged when I'm there, like I'm still nineteen and walk the beach every morning at sunrise with my dad.

This trip, I overheard my mom explaining to one of our relatives something that I've tried to explain to her a few times but never thought had stuck: why it is that I am so much more comfortable in the UK than in the US. She emigrated from Sicily when she was a child, so even though she's never had an accent there are still ways in which she doesn't fit, culturally speaking, times when she has to remind people that they will have to explain to her something that they think is a given because, no matter how she sounds, she's still a foreigner. And even though I was born in the US, while I was there I had the same problem: because I don't sound different people often never realized that I don't have the same cultural context that they do. Now that I am somewhere that every word I say is a reminder that I am Not From These Parts, I don't have to explain that I was homeschooled, that I'm from an immigrant family, that my background is very different from that of whomever I'm speaking to. And after years of explaining, it is a relief to be able to hide under the label that my accent gives me.

In about a month, a fair subset of my family is going to be coming across for the wedding, most of them for the first time - my siblings have been shipped over to visit, but my dad has never left America before. And while I'm excited about the wedding, I'm perhaps even more excited to see how they react to where I live now, to see what they think of over here in contrast with over there.

And maybe just a little bit I'm hoping it will put an end to all of the ridiculous questions. While I was home, my cousin (the lawyer) asked if England had any beaches, and if we could all go to the beach while they were visiting. In October.

A change of pace

Graduation happened, and I did manage to walk without falling over or otherwise embarrassing myself.
The robes were (unfortunately) blue, but the pockets were present and used to hold all of the papers and paraphernalia that I had to have on me during the ceremony.

What has it got in its pocketses, precious?

And if that wasn't enough, the address was given by the school's chancellor, Rose Tremain, so of course it was wonderfully appropriate for fiction writers. And if that wasn't enough, Colm Toibin then addressed us on being an itinerant writer and the immateriality of national borders, so I felt particularly spoken to by the whole affair. More MA people turned up to the reception afterwards than I expected, and no food that I could eat was present at the reception, which I had expected, so I made friends with the nice boy that poured the champagne and as a result have a vague memory of discussing fiction and process but no recollection of the particulars. 

And the day after, Dave and I forayed into the lanes of Norwich and bought wedding rings. Which is something we've been trying to do for a few months, as the city is lousy with little jewelry shops, but which has been repeatedly stymied by the fact that Dave usually comes up on weekends and the privately owned shops tend to only be open weekdays.

And the day after that, I realised that an awful lot of work goes into making a wedding happen, and I'd better get cracking because we didn't have much time. Given the number of people in my family that are in catering, I always expected to have no more involvement in the planning of this occasion than showing up on time and keeping my mouth shut. Except the Atlantic kinda gets in the way of that. So I'm on my own with Dave, hoarding fluffy white things in the spare room like a tulle-obsessed squirrel and repeatedly explaining to my family members that over here is a lot like over there, and we have grocery stores and cars and thing, and that while it is a comparatively small country, flying in to Aberdeen would make a great story later but not a lot of sense, regardless of the price of airfare. My cousin - a 35 year old criminal defence lawyer - was surprised to find out that we have shopping malls; she's also looking forward to using her 'English accent' the whole time she's here.

If there weren't so much PhD work to keep after, I probably would have lost it by now.


  

Graduation

Considering that it's been ten months since the 2012 MA cohort turned in our dissertations, raised our glasses, and (for the most part) got the hell out of Norwich as fast as possible, it's a little difficult for me to grasp the idea that tomorrow those of us that can be bothered to haul butt up here will collect diplomas. While my undergraduate graduation was a week-long carnival of pomp and circumstance, interspersed with evenings of wine and sobbing, this one looks like it's going to be an efficient exercise in people shuffling, with the briefest possible interlude at the end for cheap wine and nibbles. And I'm having a hard time getting worked up about it since, unlike finishing undergrad, nothing about life is going to change afterwards. Right now it feels like an unwelcome blip in routine that will require me to actually put on clothes in the morning and talk to people, and I know that during any speeches I'll be thinking about all the lovely lovely primary sources that showed up on my doorstep the other day that I could be cataloguing. 

There are so many books in there that they just gave me the post bag. And instead of reading them I have to wear triple layers in July and make nice to people.

An aside: the robes. I love academic robes. I was quite irked to find that our robes will be blue. A rather bright shade of blue. Academic robes are not supposed to be blue. I'm hoping that, despite the color, they will be proper Masters robes, which have lovely deep pockets sewn into the sleeves, traditionally so that one could store one's books in them. Should they be, as I highly suspect they will, mere Bachelors robes, sans hanging sleeves and accompanying pockets, I may be cross enough to say something. 

Feelings about graduations aside, with hindsight I can say that I'm very glad that I did the Masters, I'm very glad that I survived the Masters, and that I'm very glad that I didn't know the reputation of the program or the city before I came across. To elaborate backwards: Norwich is miserable in the winter and provincial all year round, but it's a good place to be when one's purpose is work. Now that I'm on the mend (I'm not joking when I say senior year nearly killed me) I realise how ill I was for a majority of the program, and I wish I had been in better nick so I could have gotten more out of it - but being not well kept me in my room a lot and led to a lot of work getting done, so I really can't complain. It's pure chance that I picked UEA; I was looking for a stepping stone to a PhD, and didn't have any idea of the reputation of the program or the kind of people that would be enrolled with me. It was at times difficult, frustrating, and lonely, but on the whole it was a good thing. I learned a lot technically and professionally, and came out the end of it with a novel and lots of contacts without losing my sanity. 

Now if only I could key myself up to put on a dress tomorrow.

A Parcel of Penguins.

I was drafting this morning, and I realised that I needed to know the date of the Branch Davidian Massacre in Waco, Texas.

I've already looked up the date of the Waco massacre, and I've written it down. Twice. On the backs of pieces of paper that had important things on their other side. So heaven knows where they are now.

I may have written something important for The Shore on the back of my CAS Letter, which is the sealed and notarised document that gets me into the country.

So I realised that I needed a notebook dedicated to information about this novel, since it involves a lot of this type of minutia.

The notebook I bought, because every time I go to a bookstore I spend twenty minutes looking at them

 I have a thing for notebooks. An obsession. And i figured that this circumstance justified indulging the obsession. So I went to Waterstones especially for a Paper Blank. Because they are pretty and I've wanted one for a while. Which is why I didn't go for a Moleskine, which are like crack to every academic I know - someone gives us the first one as a present and then ever after you can't switch back. I have one I was given by the head of the writing lab for tutoring my sophomore year of undergrad, and it still looks new. After being in my bag when a water bottle exploded. Twice.

So I went for a notebook, and I had a poke around, and I discovered something beautiful.

I have the biggest intellectual crush on this man. 

There are one hundred of them.

Left to right: The Art of War, A Room of One's Own, and the Tao Te Ching.

They each cost less than a double on the rocks. 

I've gone to bookstores in three cities and I still haven't found a copy of A Tale of a Tub: The hunt is on!

And they make me happy - Penguin was originally founded to provide good, cheap reading material for people in transit, way back when all the real literature worth reading was expensive and not pocket sized. So having a copy of Mill on liberty feels like a wonderful return to basics. Though I may have taken to darting into every bookshop I pass in the hope of finding them all.

If all of my books were bound in this format The Luminaries would probably be six inches thick.

Oh, and look what wandered over my doorstep today:

There was one thing that surprised me upon finally seeing these two side by side:

See it? Seeeee it?

There's a half inch difference in the thickness of these two books. I measured. And it isn't because Twilight has large print and wide margins. Quite the opposite, actually.

Stars on the left, Twilight on the right

For some reason, I expected Stars to be more substantial. And Twilight to be quite a bit less substantial. Huh. So far, the only comparison I can draw is that one's got a handily short title, while the other is a pain to type over and over again. That should soon be remedied by the four hour train journey to Reading that's coming up later this week. I don't know whether I'm apprehensive or excited.

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.