The latest cause célèbre among the political chattering class is the bowdlerization of Roald Dahl's books to remove a few words here and there that are no longer considered suitable for polite company:
The thrilling nastiness that children love about Dahl isn’t completely expunged, but the range of things he can be nasty about is narrowing.
Mrs Twit remains beastly, but no longer ugly. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, spoilt Veruca Salt is still spoilt and Mike Teavee still screen-obsessed; but greedy, doughy Augustus Gloop is now somewhat awkwardly “enormous”, not fat....That “fat” can’t now be employed as a lazy synonym for hateful, or that schools now are infinitely kinder and gentler places than Dahl’s sadistic-sounding prep, is wholeheartedly a good thing. But these cultural shifts do create an unmistakable gap between today’s under-10s — the actual audience for children’s books — and nostalgic adults, which seems increasingly hard to bridge.
From the volume of the bipartisan outrage over this you'd think that woke censors working out of the White House had despoiled the works of Plato. But really, folks, this is not something to get bent out of shape about. These are books for kids, not classics of the Western canon. It really doesn't matter if a few hundred words across all of Dahl's titles have been changed because society today has different ideas about what's suitable for children.
In fact, I'm all for it as long as it's done judiciously and with good sense. Frankly, if you aren't willing to support something this trivial as a way of addressing racism, sexism, fat phobia, and so forth, you might ask yourself just how dedicated you are to fighting those things in the first place.
And keep in mind that this kind of tampering happens constantly. Every time you watch a movie on an airline flight, you're watching a bowdlerized version that was carefully constructed to offend no one. If you can put up with that, surely you can put up with some minuscule changes to a few kids' books.
POSTSCRIPT: As for "nostalgic" parents, give me a break. Children can get along perfectly well without any exposure at all to the stuff you adored madly when you were a child. Conservatives let this sort of nostalgia control their lives, and it does none of us any good.
Newspeak was certain to engender some initial resistance.
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I can't stand all this woke pretence that some words are too bad to put in print. It's f***ed.
Oh please. I have to assume the majority of this partisan bellyaching is coming from people without young kids.
Leave aside the "woke" stuff... pretty much every cartoon I loved in the 1970s is basically unwatchable today. Literally every one involves shooting someone in the face, smashing them over the head with a shovel, or otherwise just being an abusive asshole. I loved it as a kid, but man, the idea of my kids watching that stuff makes me cringe. Modern cartoons are so much better, and f'ing nicer. You'd almost think our entire society had been lead poisoned or something.
Some things just don't age well.
“ Some things just don't age well”
For instance, the Babar books. Babar is married to his cousin. In “The Travels of Babar” his cousin/wife is kidnapped by “savage cannibals” who are depicted in the illustrations as stereotyped blacks who, when confronted with clothing are unable to fathom how to put them on and out their heads through pants legs, etc. The book was revised in the 90’s. I would not read the original version to my grandkids.
So when I read those Babar books I basically turned into some kind of redneck racist? Uh, no. Cartoony books are exaggerated and that's why kids and other people like them. We are considering books about talking elephants, after all. Parents can do as my wife and I did when reading books to our kid: stop and explain why someone in 1930 would make fun of cannibals, and so forth. Cleaning up everything in light of today's standards will only last so long before they need to be cleaned up again. We've been down this road with Shakespeare and even the Bible (Daddy, what does begat mean? Mommy, I don't think Cain is very nice! Why did Noah get drunk? etc.).
I’ve never seen a bible directed at children that included Lot’s daughters getting him drunk and having sex with him. Things directed at children are usually expunged of such things. By high school kids are ready to be exposed to more adult literature, I think. And that’s why I would oppose any changes in art and literature at that level in most cases.
I wonder how you would feel about the Babar story I mentioned if you were black. I participated in an online conversation regarding Fantasia (one of my favorite films) in which a Black guy talked about how humiliating he found it that Black people were portrayed as servile donkeys in the “Pastoral” section of the movie. I’m not sorry it was removed.
And there we see the difference.
I do not think my kids are going to turn into monsters because they see Bugs Bunny being a lovable asshole. They have also seen many of his banned cartoons, but they somehow manage to go to an international school with black, Japanese, and German classmates without going Jim Crow / WWII on their asses.
I don't know, have you watched any Bugs Bunny from the 1940s recently? He is really an asshole.
No art featuring an asshole could be enriching!
During the 40’s, cartoons weren’t just for kids. In fact, during the war many were directed to an audience of newly enlisted/drafted young men. Here’s one of the most famous. And to show what a geek I am, I know that Red was animated by Preston Blair. I even own a drawing of “her” drawn by him starring in another cartoon, Uncle Tom’s Cabaña.
https://vimeo.com/216356842
As you might have guessed, I’m a big classic animation fan. My kids, grand kids, nieces and nephews have all seen cartoons like The Great Piggy Bank Robbery and Popeye the Sailor meets Sinbad the Sailor and many others. Still, there are some I would withhold until they are older. Such as:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlquOmv7Kk8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UacUR7bPnMM
Here’s an interview with Robert Clampett (a real favorite of mine) in which he talks about Bug’s aggressiveness during the war years:
http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Funnyworld/Clampett/interview_bob_clampett.htm
I also recommend following the link in the article to the Chuck Jones interview.
A few months ago I got the idea I should watch all the Bugs Bunny cartoons in order on HBO and Robert Clampett was really a revelation. I like his episodes better than the Chuck Jones directed episodes from the 1940s.
My whole image of Bugs had been formed by the more Chuck Jones 1950s version so I was surprised by how many Bugs cartoons I had not seen before, and even more so by how much of a real jerk Bugs could be just because he could get away with it, and that the audience is presumably finding this hilarious.
The impression became so overwhelming I had to stop halfway through the 40s and haven't gotten back to it yet.
That Bugs episode you linked above definitely is not on HBO, but, aside from the caricature it's actually less offensive than some of them!
It’s basically Elmer in blackface with a “black people can’t resist playing dice” joke.
Have you ever seen thenChuck Jones directed “Angel Puss”:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8bmnbd
Jones was a big time liberal but even he has a censored cartoon.
No, I hadn't seen any of those before. In one sense they aren't as awful as you'd think they could have been, on the other it's pretty awful, though not as awful as the donkeys in Fantasia, which I'd forgotten about.
Was All This and Rabbit Stew re-done entirely as an Elmer episode or was it just that the gags were recycled through several of them, or vice versa?
For me Tex Avery, like Frank Tashlin, is someone easy to admire but hard to love. I don't care for surrealism for it's own sake, I quickly start feeling like I've been hit with a brick.
It was just a lazy rehash of typical Bugs Bunny/Elmer jokes, I think. Are you familiar with the Censored 11?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censored_Eleven
For what it’s worth I think Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs and Tin Pan Alley Cats are excellent cartoons. Clampett loved going to the black jazz clubs in LA and had many musician friends. He insisted they record the sound track on those cartoons rather than the usual Warner’s orchestra and voice actors. But I don’t think they are appropriate for children who can’t understand the historical context. Same goes for Disney’s Song of the South.
I haven't seen the censored 11, but now that you've got me intedrested I'm going to look at all of them.
Just watched Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs. How racist is it? I'm really interested in what the black people who worked on it thought. Certainly the features of the figures aren't more exaggerated than other characters in Warners cartoons, and not more vulgar than contemporary cartoons, it's just the blackface aspect that brings it out and that seems to have become more an issue in retrospect than at the time.
I saw Song of the South when it was re-issued in the 60s. I don't remember anything that seemed problematical about it aside from what seemed like a forced cheeriness, though I was pretty young at the time. Now I'm curious to see that again as well!
And the Evil Queen being a gay caricature on top of a black caricature astonished me.
The more I think about this the better it gets.
Floyd Norman, Disney’s first black animator loves SOTS. He even wrote the foreword to the book “Who’s Afraid of Song of the South”. You can read his forward on the Amazon web page if you click on “look inside”. It’s a really interesting book with all the details of the making of the film. A lot of the racism in the film is pretty subtle. Went completely over my head when I was a kid. I thought the black people were wonderful and fun loving and the white people were stuffy and dour. James Baskett gives a wonderful performance and even voices some of the cartoon characters. It’s a shame that it has such a bad reputation.
Completely agree, though I'd really want to see it again. I'm sure the version I saw must have had some judicious edits. I do remember thinking there was a part that seemed to jump over something.
After seeing it I then proceeded to read a couple Uncle Remus books, so I must have liked it!
Wait did nobody get that kenalovell's comment was an ironic joke?!
At least you did.
Ok, that's pretty funny.
Not sure if you've communicated with conservatives lately, but it's basically impossible to tell the difference now. So yea, as a public service going forward you should probably plaster HASHTAG THIS IS MEANT TO BE IRONIC on anything like that. 😛
An important detail to note is that no external authority is forcing these changes -- they are coming from the owners of the publishing rights themselves.
An important detail to note is that no external authority is forcing these changes -- they are coming from the owners of the publishing rights themselves.
I guess that's important: it's the greed of the heirs and the publisher that's driving this change. If they're smart they'll publish two versions, original and woke (and use the controversy to sell more overall books).
For the record I think Drum is way off on this one. Many major works of literature were written primarily with young readers in mind. That doesn't render them unimportant. Butchering a dead writer's prose just seems wrong in a deeply visceral way. It's extremely disrespectful to the writer. It's also highly paternalistic and patronizing toward today's children.
The desire to manage your own property is seen as greed by some I guess.
Maximizing profits by butchering the prose of your deceased father or grandfather (a beloved and famous literary figure)? Yep, that's greed in my book. I'm not questioning their legal right to do so. And I like free enterprise as much as the next person. But not everything is justified merely because a property right can be evoked.
I couldn't agree more. This is a corporate decision to try to extend the value of Dahl's works to his survivors, full stop; any modification of the text needs to be understood first and foremost in that context.
It's obvious that some sort of consultant got their hooks into the Dahl estate and convinced them that this nonsense would somehow make the books 0.0002% more likely to sell to such-and-such demographic. If there is a better argument against the legitimacy endless copyrights like this, I don't know what it is.
I personally think it's obvious that literature shouldn't be modified like this, and notably it isn't in cases where the copyright has lapsed; problematic as they are to current audiences, I think everyone agrees that the many N-bombs in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are an authentic component of Twain's work and their inclusion informs the historical context of the novel. But nobody can get rich by expunging them from the text, so nobody cares.
Huckleberry Finn is notable as among the first American novels to be written in the vernacular that the characters would have actually spoken in. To change it would be to white wash historical fact.
One of my favorite parts of the novel is Huck anguishing over his Aunt Polly's admonition that if he breaks the law he will not go to heaven. The law in this case is that he must turn in his friend Jim as an escaped slave. Huck finally decides that if his Aunt Polly is going to heaven he probably doesn't want to go there anyway. Similar thoughts cross my mind every time I hear right wingers go on and on about what it's going to be like when they go to heaven.
That's what got the book banned in Twain's time - not the n-word but the sacrilegious idea that Huck was willing to go to hell in order to help a slave escape.
Disney removed the Jewish stereotype in the 3 Little Pigs in 1948:
https://youtu.be/BB1mMNvrUrM
Also removed black stereotypes from Fantasia:
https://youtu.be/gyPFibRadto
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was revised in Dahl's own lifetime to make the depiction of the Oompa Loompa's less overtly racist. Obviously some people don't have enough to worry about.
That's what got the book banned in Twain's time - not the n-word but the sacrilegious idea that Huck was willing to go to hell in order to help a slave escape.
> These are books for kids, not classics of the Western canon.
Those are not contradictory; many books for kids are classics.
That said, however, I have no objection at all to the books being revised.
What I do wish is that they'd gone into the public domain when they were supposed to. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is 60 years old, and the law when it was written set copyright duration to a maximum of 56 years, so it should, by now, have been legal to publish whatever version of that book you wanted to, including the unmodified original.
There are revised editions of Tom Sawyer out there (a book with a much stronger claim to being part of the Western canon) but nobody's outraged by that because the original is right there on the shelf next to it. But the revised Dahl books are going to be the only ones for sale, and that's the only reason it bothers people.
There are revised editions of Tom Sawyer out there (a book with a much stronger claim to being part of the Western canon) but nobody's outraged by that because the original is right there on the shelf next to it. But the revised Dahl books are going to be the only ones for sale, and that's the only reason it bothers people.
I'll agree there. Somehow or other, Tom and Huck without the n-word removes some of Twain's point, but having the original available to compare is helpful.
Removing it from "Huck Finn" tends to spoil a lot of the point entirely.
I've got an earlier edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with the original Oompa-Loompas, and it's an interesting contrast, but it doesn't affect the story to make them generic Euro-trash. And cutting "fat" from the description of young Master Gloop doesn't change much: clearly he's still gluttonous and odious and obnoxious. And "enormous."
Does he still fall in the river and get stuck in the pipe?
When my son was young we read to him every night, including abridged versions of the classics like "Moby-Dick" and "Treasure Island." It was a good thing those versions existed, because neither my four-year-old son nor his parents were going to make it though a thousand pages of Herman Melville. I can't recall if the Twain books were in the series, but at his age I wouldn't have wanted to be quoting Huck Finn using the n-word. That would be rightly offensive and inappropriate at that age. Words like "ugly" and "fat" are hardly in the same ballpark. I know we read some Dahl too. It was never a problem.
Editions of Twain specifically for young kids are OK. What's not OK is taking the n-word out all editions of "Huck Finn." I'd say by high school readers should be able to read the original Twain. The language, offensive as it might be to our ears, is integral to understanding the story and the times. Without it, readers may be missing the point. We cannot understand our history and our place in the world if we are always cleaning up tales of the past because modern sensibilities get rankled. Truth is, many of current problems are because we haven't been rankled enough. People want to believe the bowdlerized half-truths about what came before, and where is that leading us? To book bans, for Christ's sake. We are an adolescent culture (look at what's playing at the multiplex) fighting against the need to grow up. To paraphrase Dylan, we were so much older then, we're younger than that now.
"We cannot understand our history and our place in the world if we are always cleaning up tales of the past because modern sensibilities get rankled."
Winston Smith's job in 1984 was to put formerly acceptable prose and information into the memory hole to destroy it. Orwell apparently thought the whole truth was preferable to the cleaned-up version.
Yeah, I don't see it as a big deal.
You mean fat-shaming?
This isn't a binary system. In some cases, "addressing" these things means erasing history. White-washing history of its shameful legacy lays down the trap of allowing people to incorrectly romanticize the past. In other cases, allowing racist or sexist laws to remain on the books is to bait conservatives into turning SCOTUS into what it is today -- a revisionist arm of conservatism.
But about fat-shaming, I think you incorrectly lump it in with racism and sexism. Racism and sexism are clearly not diseases; they are biases.
While body image and body shape bias are debatable issues of bias, particularly in the contradicting duality of Japanese society's reverence of 500 pound sumo wrestlers and its extreme bias against fat people, morbid obesity is an endocrinologic disease.
And if we can't agree on whether or not morbid obesity is a disease, then, we should eliminate sugary beverage taxes and all other "sin" taxes.
Given all the bullying which (allegedly) happens in schools, this kinder and gentler language in books seems ineffective so far. I think I read the book, but as a kid the Willy Wonka movie definitely creeped me out.
But I don’t think that there were nearly so many overweight kids back when these books were written.
Children's books have been rewritten many times to make them more in line with contemporary sensibilities - check out the original versions of the Brothers Grimm for example. Or the children's versions of "Gulliver's Travels" that leave out the sex, scatology, and cynicism.
The original title of Agatha Christie's classic "And Then There Were None" is totally unacceptable today, so they changed it. P.G. Wodehouse also used the N-word rather gratuitously a few times, I'd rather see it censored out than not be able to enjoy Wodehouse.
"Huckleberry Finn" is a bit of a different story - one of the major themes of the novel is how Huck comes to realize that black people are human beings, contrary to everything he has been taught. That said, I'd rather young people read a bowdlerized version than not read it at all.
Roald Dahl came out of a rather nasty and patronizing English public school culture. I don't see why we need to perpetuate that.
I’m skeptical that bowdlerizing children’s books is an effective way of ending a “nasty and patronizing English public school culture”.
I stole you words. Thanks
My initial thought was that revising art to comply with today's sympathies is appalling. People have been upset by Huck Finn's use of language for a long time, and yet people continue to read it in its original form. To my knowledge, not one of these intrepid readers has keeled over as a result.
Then I figured there has been a long history of exactly this sort of idiocy -- Victorians covering up nudes with drapes, classical musicians altering works in any number of ways, colorization of films, etc. And there is always a deserved backlash, sometimes resulting in artists devoted to setting these works to right, back to how the author/composer/artist wanted them. As stupid and shortsighted as I find the administrators of Roald Dahl's works, this may soon devolve into and New Coke/Classic Coke situation, which was, of course, a boon for the Coca-Cola Company.
I am a Classic Coke man. If Mr. Dahl wrote that someone was fat, then by golly I want to read that she was fat. Not enormous, not portly, not full-figured. Fat will do just fine. You have a problem with it, don't read the book. Your loss. Or read New Coke and experience pre-chewed food where the spice has been regulated for your comfort.
Perhaps they could leave the books alone and plaster trigger warnings all over them...
I don't see why you can't do both, in fact it has been regularly done for as long as there has been a children's book publishing industry. If you want your kids to read "Gulliver's Travels" just for the adventure part without all the sex and poop jokes, you get them a special "young readers' edition" and if you want to read it yourself (which you definitely should if you haven't) you get an unabridged edition from Oxford Press or the like.
I don't see that as censorship - the original is still available for those who want it. It's just made available in a form that more parents will be comfortable about their kids reading. If the kids are precocious enough to seek out the original (like I probably would have at that age), more power to them.
“I am a Classic Coke man.”
Where do you get it with its original formula, including the cocaine?
Well said.
There's the problem. People who view this as a matter of "preserving art" are missing the point. This is a parenting thing. Parents don't necessarily want their kids exposed to certain things, and that's their right. It's been that way for millennia, although everyone just draws the line in different places. I'm assuming you support banning the porn classics from the school library?
So for some "classic" books that are a must read, but happen to be a liiiiiitle bit racist as hell, you're left with the choice of removing them from the library, or making a kids version of them to bring them up to modern sensibilities. Is this really that big of a deal?
And that's why we have new children's books.
I'll remember things from my past fondly. Then I'll re-read or watch them now....and ... some are still great to share while others do not hold up well. And many need to be understood in the context of their time.
"many need to be understood in the context of their time."
You are being way too sensible.
Kevin declares that nostalgia is an illegitimate preference:
As for "nostalgic" parents, give me a break. Children can get along perfectly well without any exposure at all to the stuff you adored madly when you were a child. Conservatives let this sort of nostalgia control their lives, and it does none of us any good.
In the passage above no reasons are given for that assessment.
Yeah, there's definitely some parental ego involved - I want my kids to like the same stuff I liked.
Just for the record, "enormous" is in no way equivalent to "fat."
For what it's worth, JK Rowling addressed this dumbing down, sanitizing for children's oh-so-delicate sensibilities in the intro to "The Tales of Beadle the Bard." Which you may want to avoid, because Ms Rowling believes that there is such a thing as "women." But, on the other hand, that will give you another reason to hate her! Win-Win!!
It's nice to see folks getting upset about children's books. It's almost as if lots of kids still read them or something.
I was reminded of this when I was listening to The Daily, which featured a story about Moms for Liberty working to get a high school librarian to ditch a few books kept on hand for the LGBTQ and questioning kids. Are you Moms for Liberty REALLY concerned about your kids being exposed to such "filth"? Because there's far worse that your kids can easily access on the Internet using their phones, and I can be fairly certain that they do, if not on their own phones then on their friends' phones.
There is something galling about changing the past. It is an emotional response, not an intellectual one, therefore there is no need to justify or explain it.
The Telegraph posted a list of the revisions. After reading them, I can only conclude they are the product of a deranged mind. The changes make no sense and they're not even being applied consistently.
1. You can't describe a tractor as "black" or a silkworm as "white."
2. You can't describe drums as "tiny."
3. You can't use the word "hag" in a book titled "The Witches."
4. You can call a character "enormous," but not "huge." You can't call a character "fat," but you can say he looks like his body "was inflated with a powerful pump."
5. They delete all use of the word "pale" in BFG, then later replace the word "white" with "pale" in Mathilda.
6. The small badger in Fantastic Mr. Fox is no longer Badgers son. They delete all references to his gender and any familial relationship with the other Badger.
7. You can't describe the Oompa Loompa children as "No more than four inches tall."
8. You can't say "crazy" or "mad," but you can say "barmy," "nutty," "dotty" or "out of her mind."
9. You can refer to shooting people but not "with guns." You can refer to "knuckledusters" but not "stilettos."
10. They delete a reference to a Keats poem.
11. You can say a man has a "wife and children," but not "a wife and ten children."
12. They replace "midget" with "tiny," then replace "tiny" with "little," then replace "little" with "titchy," then delete the word "titchy." WHICH IS THE OFFENSIVE WORD?
13. They replace "boys" with "children" and then replace "idiots" with "boys!"
And they just go on and on.
That sounds absolutely disordered.
You are reporting this list of changes as if it is coming from some government agency or local school marm. I'm not sure anyone is saying "You can't" do this or that. It's just that they made these changes. I was similarly mad when someone changed up Dr. Suess's ABCs but I didn't anyone was saying you "can't" say "ABCDEFG" but instead must say "Big G, little g, what begins with g." It was just a dumb editorial decision. That's what all of these sound like. Almost like all the fiddling that keeps being done to the Star Wars movies.
If Dahl were around, he'd have choice words for his new editors.
That sounds positively deranged. Perhaps I lack imagination (heck, I KNOW I "lack imagination"; that's why I read), but I can't see how any of these changes improve, or even de-offensify the work.
Now, let's see what they do to "Huckleberry Finn." Wherein a little unhomed cismale boy takes a journey with a manual laborer of indeterminate gender who's on holiday.
Some of these are just baffling:
1. "Denizens of the underworld" is changed to "Residents of the underworld."
2. "Gang of armed thugs" is changed to "gang of armed robbers."
3. They delete the phrase "you've gone white as a sheet"
4. Willy Wonka cannot give "orders" to the Oompa Loompa's, only "instructions"
5. "Poisonous gases" is changed to "poisonous fumes."
6. You can't refer to chickens as "stupid."
7. You can't refer to television as "an idiotic thing."
8. You can say hunters "just shot their prey" but not that the prey was an elephant.
9. They cut the phrase "they screamed" from "They gaped. They screamed. They started to run."
10. You can say the Witches feet "were square at the end" but not that they "had no toes"
11. You can say someone has a "bald head" but not a "bald, pimply head."
Somewhat apropos of this, yesterday I watched "Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical" on Netflix. Anyone watched it? I thought it was pretty good overall.
On the subject of this post, Dahl was famously rather dyspeptic, shall we say (late in life he called himself an "antisemite"). If you're really interested in this topic look up the pieces in the Washington Post about Dahl by a book reviewer named Michael Dirda. He's a Dahl fan who has followed the various biographies of Dahl over the years.
Anyway, somewhat relevant to this post, "Matilda" has been subjected to the recent vogue for "race-blind" casting. In this case I think it works because it's a fantasy story. In a movie like Lena Dunham's "Birdy", which I saw last year, the story is set in the Middle Ages in England and suddenly there are Black characters who are landowners right next to everyone else. It feels like a cop out to me. The Middle Ages were not that woke!
As usual, Hollywood is trying hard to avoid another "Oscars So White" campaign, but presents poor people or working class characters as uncultured buffoons. In "Matilda", the girl hero has an upper class accent, for instance, and her garish, selfish, materialistic parents (they hate books; their daughter loves books) have typically lower class accents. But that kind of prejudice is okay, or so it seems in Hollywood. I was left wondering what Mike Leigh thinks of this movie, or what it would be like if he directed it.
"Hollywood is trying hard to avoid another "Oscars So White" campaign"
I really liked the 'hood Oscars show last year, with crude humor and a physical smack-down and "That's the way we do it."" That was so superior to the pabulum we had been offered for decades. I hope we get more trash talk and violence next time.
Painting a fig leaf on the naughty bits. Does it work, and are they actually naughty?
What may be Ken Burns most interesting documentary is the one on Prohibition. For me it was an eye-opener to hear about the sheer scale of general drunkenness in the period leading up to it and how this period of enforced sobriety, though it only lasted ten years, successfully worked to leave a better society.
A society now plagued, despite energetically enforced prohibition, with addictions to methamphetamine and opioids, natural and synthetic.
Yes, but Burns is strongly suggesting it was worse 110 years ago.
Cocaine and heroin were legal, people would take benzedrine for their hangovers.
And sometimes radium,
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=radium+paste&t=ffab&atb=v355-1&iax=images&ia=images
Sorry, I see this as part of the worldwide trend towards authoritarianism. Parents have the responsibility to be aware of what their own children are reading, and to help them understand difficult content in the context they consider appropriate. This obviously does not mean a group of activist parents should decide what other people’s kids can read, in the home or in school. I wouldn’t object to bowdlerized versions alongside original, unredacted editions. I’m not a medical professional, and I don’t know if using disinfectants and sanitizers has weakened our immune systems. But I do think that attempting to purge every disturbing or even challenging opinion or assertion from the public realm will diminish our capacity for critical thinking
"Sorry, I see this as part of the worldwide trend towards authoritarianism."
You're a nutter. The Dahl estate or whoever owns publication rights to the books is editing them because they decided they wanted to. That's the opposite of authoritarianism (and frankly, not dissimilar from selling new editions with different cover art, forwards, typo corrections, etc., which is an age-old practice for any book lucky enough to get more than one edition). Now, if you are upset because copyrights keep getting extended and therefore the government prevents YOU from publishing your own version of like The Witches or Matilda or something, that's a different question, and I'm there with you--copyrights shouldn't be immortal.
But, if you would like to expose people to "every disturbing or even challenging opinion or assertion," by all means, write away! Nobody associated with these Dahl changes is stopping you.
They are the owners of the rights, not the author, who is not available to approve or disapprove the changes. I very much doubt that they are making the changes simply because ‘they wanted to’. They may sincerely believe that they are protecting us from distasteful expression, or they may cynically be hoping for improved sales; I have no idea. But this is not a matter of correcting typos, or adding a foreword. It’s Bowdlerization, whether driven by prissiness or greed.
Per your argument, nothing stopped the heirs or publisher from releasing their own original work, expressing whatever they want, instead of putting words in Ronald Dahl’s mouth (or pen).
"They are the owners of the rights, not the author, who is not available to approve or disapprove the changes."
Hey, like I said, if you think that copyrights should be limited (say, to the life of the author or something), I'm right there with you. But otherwise, you are complaining about what other people are doing with their private property.
Put it another way. Let's say your dad published something, died, and then decades later, you decide you'd like to publish a new edition of dear ol' dad's book. But you also decide that you'd like to revise some language that, from the vantage of the present, appears really racist (for whatever reason--prissiness, greed, a sense that your dad, who was after all a good guy and not racist at all, would probably have chosen different words if he still around to publish a new edition). Should rando posters on the internet get to dictate to you what is and isn't putting words in your dad's mouth?
I had already stated that I do not object to bowdlerized editions of works with problematic content, so long as they do not supplant the original versions. To amplify: such editions should be clearly identified as such, and the editors should be named; that is the minimum of respect owed to the original author. And, if so moved, those rando [sic] posters can acquire both editions, and identify exactly where the editors have put words in the author's mouth, or removed them.
KD: "In fact, I'm all for it as long as it's done judiciously and with good sense. "
"Judiciously and with good sense" is not at all how the changes have been made. The examples I've seen are exactly the opposite.
Changes like calling Mrs. Twit "beastly" instead of "ugly and beastly." Please.
Old and new versions of text from "The Witches":
2001: “Don’t be foolish,” my grandmother said. “You can’t go around pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens.”
2022: “Don’t be foolish,” my grandmother said. “Besides, there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
Dahl's version is lively writing, and if anyone takes offense at lively writing, fuck 'em. The revision is DOA.
If you're going to change the original title of Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians," that's one thing. Likewise, a few of the Seuss retractions. But the Dahl edits are not changing grossly offensive language. It's some (less talented) snoot coming along and saying 'if I were writing the story I'd say it this way.'
I can't imagine if Dahl were alive he'd OK any of these revisions. But he might want to take his name off the books.
"Dahl's version is lively writing, and if anyone takes offense at lively writing, fuck 'em. The revision is DOA."
Then don't buy it. Nobody is forcing you to.
You didn't address his point. Would it kill you to acknowledge that there has been a degradation in quality?
"You didn't address his point."
That was deliberate. Arguing which version is better based on at most a comparison of two sentences in a ~36,000 word book is not a very worthwhile exercise to undertake in a comment thread on a blog post. Plus the main issue isn't really which is better, but whether we all ought to be upset if the owners of the copyright to a Dahl's works changes a few words in new editions of some books that most of us likely haven't read for decades if ever. Absent some compelling evidence that the changes are being made at the behest of a government in order to censor/propagandize certain views, my answer is "no."
"Would it kill you to acknowledge that there has been a degradation in quality?"
No, but see above.
Sigh. I'm talking about just those two passages. We both know you're ducking because you know the old version is better than the revised one.
Notice I didn't address _your_ point because it was irrelevent to the one he was making. I'm merely tasking you with staying on track. I don't think that is an unreasonsable request.
Fine, here's my answer: I don't care. The book is a book; those sentences are sentences. Judging an entire book by the quality of an excised couple of lines is silly. I'm not going to reread The Witches just so I can have an opinion about a tweaked line, and I doubt anybody else here is going to either, as much fun as folks are having getting all puffed up claiming that one "version is better than the [other] one" as support for their righteous indignation about a revised edition of a kid's book.
THIS! You want to make revisions, fine. But make sure they're up to the prose of the original text. Clunky cut-and-paste is obscene.
Hard to see why protecting the literary integrity in works like "Dr. Doolittle" has greater value than preventing normalizing the racism in it for young children. I guess it is not a perfect analogy, but Christians regard for the Bible as sacred word of God hasn't prevented its translations from being edited in many ways.
Yeah! Excise all the nasty bits from Dahl! It will fit right into the Florida curriculum which glosses over plantation slavery, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights movement. This is of a piece with eliminating reproductive education, or doing "abstinance only" lessons. The presence of homosexuality is also something no child should ever hear about; "don't say gay"!
Best of all, I hear that the Bowdler version of Shakespeare's plays is still available! Let's use those, and ditch the original, upsetting versions with all the bad words!
This isn't a matter of culling a few words here and there. Some of these changes are substantial rewrites which materially alter the story. For example, they change the ending of George's Marvelous Medicine. In the original, George's mother admits she's relieved the evil grandmother has vanished because she "was becoming a bit of a nuisance." In the revised version, that reveal is cut. But it's the punchline to the whole story! Take it out and I guess Mrs. Kranky just had to spend the rest of her life dealing with the fact that her son basically murdered her mother.
"In fact, I'm all for it as long as it's done judiciously and with good sense."
That's the part that gets me. I'm still giggling.
This is bad and I'm really starting to lose interest in Mr. Drum's increasingly poor opinions.
Yeah, but now enormous is going to become an unacceptable insult. Whenever they come up with a euphemism, the stigma follows. (My favorite is cretin which was chosen for the mentally retarded to remind people that they were still Christians and worthy for that. Now, it's just another insult.)
Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out Of Touch With Her Generation
https://www.theonion.com/cool-dad-raising-daughter-on-media-that-will-put-her-en-1819572981
It goes well beyond a word here and there. The selling point of Dahl is his nastiness. Taking it out is an example of capital protecting itself. From The Atlantic:
"A few edits, though, are so contrary to the spirit of Dahl that they feel like a violation. In The Witches, for example, the protagonist’s grandmother warns him to watch out for the evil women who rule the world. They are bald, and cover this up with wigs, as well as hiding their claws under gloves. The grandmother used to say: “You can’t go round pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens.” Instead, in the 2022 Puffin edition, she warns the youngster that “there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
"One of the inadvertently funniest amendments is a passage in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which once explained how the Oompa-Loompas—whom Dahl originally wrote specifically as African “pygmies”—had come to work for Willy Wonka. “It was easy,” the deranged capitalist inventor used to say. “I smuggled them over in large packing cases with holes in them.” In the newly sanitized version, Wonka instead tells his audience that the Oompa-Loompas were volunteers and “they’ve told me they love it here.” Yes, the sensitivity readers have somehow re-created a classic trope from colonial literature: If these slaves are unhappy, why are they singing all the time?
"...Dahl staggers on, embarrassing the cultural gatekeepers by remaining popular despite being so thoroughly out of tune with the times. The work does so because of the dirty secret that children, and adults, like nastiness. They enjoy fat aunts and pranked teachers and the thrilling but illegal doping of pheasants. Today’s corporations want to have it all, though. They want the selling power of an author like Roald Dahl, shorn of the discomforting qualities that made him a best seller. They want things to be simple—a quality that we might call childlike, if Dahl hadn’t shown us that children can be so much more."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/without-nastiness-roald-dahl-isnt-roald-dahl/673141/
One thing we *should* all be able to agree on is that this isn't a 1A issue. The copyright holders can make whatever changes they want to, ill-advised or not.
Conservatives don't like property rights, apparently.
Seems the author had some opinion on the matter: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/25/roald-dahl-threatened-publisher-with-enormous-crocodile-if-they-changed-his-words