"'You saucy beast!' becomes 'You trickster!' Other changes are just patronising.
The Witches once imagined a woman 'working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman.' Now she might be 'working as a top scientist or running a business.' Are there no women cashiers now? Rather than going white as a shee,' the Queen’s maid in
The BFG now goes 'still as a statue.' Dahl can’t even poke fun at a tortoise any more. In
Esio Trot, tortoises can only read backwards because they are 'very backwards creatures.' How rude! Now they can only read backwards ... just because. And when Boggis, Bunce and Bean set out on their tractors to destroy the foxes’ home once and for all in
Fantastic Mr Fox, the animals once noted in terror that 'The machines were black. They were murderous, brutal-looking monsters.' The tractors are no longer black, just in case a fox was being racist."
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63 comments:
You vote for progressives, you get “progress.” Progress, sadly, means a faster-built shithole. It’s all the left can produce: shitholes. History screams this truth but, like the seventeen year cicada, it only seems to be buried. It always eventually rises from the shithole it last created and climbs the trunk of a tree fertilized by it to start the nasty cycle all over again.
Ronald Dahl agrees with this comment.
"You saucy beast" cannot be improved upon.
Should we burn our DVDs of Matilda, Fantastic Mr. Fox, etc.?
Okay, I googled.
The Roald Dahl Story Company, copyright owner, is managed by the author's grandson, Luke Kelly. And he just sold all film rights to Netflix over a year ago.
He owns the family business. He's diversifying and increasing profits. If he and Puffin, with its sensitivity readers, want to update the catalog, that's their legal right.
I remember when we used to joke about Soviet history books being in ring binders. The technology has advanced since then.
This is just the beginning. They are going to do this to literally every book there is. Tolstoy? Yep. Dostoyevsky? Yep. Hemingway? Yep. Jane Austen? Yes indeed! All electronic copies of books will be edited remotely without notice or permission of the people who bought them. Hang onto your hardcopies. Turns out being Orwellian with the technology of the 2020s means you can be way, way more Orwellian then you could be with the technology of the late 1940s. This is pure evil. And it’s just getting started.
That's too bad because fiction is about the only way to go back in time and see how people thought and talked.
Hopefully they'll realize kids don't read books anymore anyway and certainly read this sanitized dreck.
'You saucy beast!' becomes 'You trickster!'
Might as well just read stories written by AI, if that's what they are going to do to real authors.
"You saucy beast" is fun. It makes me want to find an opportunity to quote it. "You trickster" is boring.
It goes beyond the meanings of the words. Dahl's word choice just has a sound that works better. It's made me think about the difficulties in translating literature. I wonder if they are making changes to foreign translations or only changing the English books.
This may be the thing that finally gets me to cancel my Netflix subscription.
Time to look for older accurate editions for the grandkids. At least this got some publicity so we know to avoid the bowlderized editions. It is unfortunate that many people will be picking up these new editions thinking the are getting the real thing. They should come with a warning label.
This isn't a new phenomenon. Shakespeare kept a weather eye out for Tudor and Stuart politics. Henry VIII offers the best material of any of the kings of that era. Shakespeare's play about him is a disappointment and is, in a way, politically correct. On the plus side, Shakespeare lived to enjoy a comfortable retirement and could dump on the Plantagenets.... G.M. Trevelyan, the English historian, came from a distinguished Whig family. He was given access to the papers and diaries of the leading Whig notables. He destroyed those papers and entries that detailed love affairs and gambling debts. I don't suppose he took the trouble to destroy those entries that reflected on the racial, class or religious views of those notables. Political correctness is a wavering line that varies from generation to generation.....The sex lives of the ancient Greeks used to be considered shocking and were sometimes censored. I guess now their great crime is that they used to own slaves and didn't treat women fairly.
Ann, the question was once asked, and apparently needs to be continually asked:
Who are the brain police?
Under this reasoning taking a 'Magic Marker' to the Mona Lisa is totally justified.
Commenter Mark justifies this under the belief that because Dahl was an anti semite his work is fair game. I don't like where that line of unreasoning is taking us. I don't know enough about Dahl to know if he is an anti semite or not. But shouldn't his work stand by itself?
There's no argument for copyrights to last longer than patents. Let them alter the text as they like, but after 20 years let others sell the original text.
The queen has declared, “Let them read about sex acts and gender unicorns! But save them from the saucy beast!”
This isn't really new. Grimm's Fairy Tales were softened over the years, in some cases by the authors themselves in subsequent editions. And then there's "Little Black Sambo." Somehow "The Five Chinese Brothers" survived.
Only a racist could object.
Luke Kelly should be taken into a middle school bathroom, upended and given a good swirly in one of the new, sit-down toilets recently installed where a urinal used to be.
His sensitivity staff can write up a press release and say some Dahl fans gave Mr. Kelly the opportunity to go snorkeling with the boneless brown trout in their natural habitat.
Well Ms. Althouse, you're the legal head here. If this is being done to 'maximize profits' by the family business, then there is money to be made. Can a person sue for False Advertising if they buy the Critical Literature Theory version of Dahl's works, and find them to be less-than original? Isn't the Dahl brand in 'James and the Giant Peach' being sullied if it's being sold under the same title?
Look on the bright side. This is going to make the price of first editions go through the roof … err I mean increase a great deal. We can't allow any violent language now, can we?
The people doing this would be clamoring to have all his work burned instead of edited if Dahl had talked about blacks the way he did Jews. This douchebag thought Jews had brought on the Holocaust themselves. Hitler, he said, "didn't just pick on them for no reason."
But no, antisemitism is the one prejudice that's considered excusable in the arc of history. Fuck them all.
"awful wreckage"
It's good that the cleansing of the culture can still be perceived that way by nice moderate people. Althouse in her own way has joined the #Resistance. But the wrecking has been going on for a very long time now. Can it still be stopped? What would it take?
As someone said yesterday, I'd like to know who, exactly, at Puffin thought this was a good idea. And why!
We continue to infaniltise our youth, making them ever softer, inclined towards grievance, and unable to deal with the actual diversity of real life, which really doesn't give a shit whether they're "offended" or their precious feelings are hurt.
"Commenter Mark justifies this under the belief that because Dahl was an anti semite his work is fair game. I don't like where that line of unreasoning is taking us."
No Wagner, Chopin or Richard Strauss. Probably the same for Beethoven and most of the German composers.
On the other hand, maybe we can take an axe to Karl Marx?
The Dahl Estate has come up with a shrewd technique to vastly increase sales. Their biggest markets for the Dahl works are public and school libraries, and as the new editions are favorably reviewed by Kirkus, Library Journal, etc., progressively inclined librarians will reflexively add the "new" titles to the semiannual buy lists. The heirs get to sell the same book twice, all with a halo of virtue.
I'm wondering: how many similarly bowdlerized versions of Huckleberry Finn are out there?
"I'd knock her flat" - at least it wasn't 'I'd knock her over and shatter her.'
'Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin good forces have invented or made'
... J.R.R. Tolkien
It’s a chilling sign of the times but also quite ridiculous and a bit funny when you consider the changes they made. For example, the character Augustus Gloop is fat, and the substitution of another word does not make any meaningful difference
“Honey, do these jeans make my ass look enormous?”
Being a sensitivity reader would be the easiest job in the whole world. Just come up with *anything* that could be construed negatively, and then go even further. It would be a great game. And my! While people who ban books are horrible, people who sensitively edit them are heroes. Imagine how good you could feel about yourself.
Who wants this though?
Fundamental Transformation == Cultural Revolution.
Gee, whoda thunk it?
Not 81 million, for sure.
Those changes make the vibrancy of the text into mealy-mouthed pablum.
Shakespeare is next.
Charlie and the Cruel, Exploitative Chocolate Factory
As a contrast,
"sex education book full of illustrations depicting sexual acts has ignited a controversy after it was left at an Oregon elementary school library, according to a report late Thursday.
The book in question, “It’s Perfectly Normal,” explains bodies, sex and sexual health, the station reported.
The illustrations in the book include pages of naked teens and adults, some depicting sex acts and even masturbation, the station reported.
Rainier School District officials defended “It’s Perfectly Normal,” according to Fox 12. The officials said the book has been approved for students 10 and up and is on the state-approved list of books allowed at the school."
It'a strange, strange world we live in..
"Under this reasoning taking a 'Magic Marker' to the Mona Lisa is totally justified."
No, not at all. The reasoning for bowdlerizing Dahl's language is to hide language in the originals presumed to be offensive, covering it over with band-aids of replacement language presumed to be inoffensive. What might one find offensive about the Mona Lisa, and how would adding a Magic Marker mustache obscure or mitigate whatever offense one might propose?
Perhaps your meaning is more general, that bowdlerizing any extant art justifies the bowdlerizing of any other art, past, present, or future. Well, there are already plenty of such historical justifications and of such alterations, as other commenters are pointing out with examples. Governor DeSantis is going Full Monty in this direction, canceling an AP class he presumes--or purports--to be wrong-think and ordering schools in Florida to empty their shelves of books, pending "review" of the books in each school's library.
It can only be the party (or parties) who have legal ownership or control of Dahl's works that could have permitted this. Are the traitors to Dahl his family or the publishers of the books?
(Small "six degrees of Roald Dahl" anecdote: When I worked at a hotel in NYC decades ago, I had a brief conversation at the front desk with Dahl's then-wife, actress Patricia Neal. She had come to the desk because she wanted something, but all I recall is that she was pretty damn drunk.)
This is akin to the Taliban blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas.
How is this different from throwing tomato soup on Van Gogh's Sunflowers?
The Dahl Estate has come up with a shrewd technique to vastly increase sales.
You mean Netflix?
Critical Revisionists' Prejudice (CRP)
"In 1984, Orwell thought carefully about the power of language. Newspeak, the invented language of the novel, is specifically designed to control the thought process via a limited vocabulary and a system of brutal simplification that prevents complex thought or the expression of any concept not in line with the totalitarian government’s orthodoxy."
Ann needs to add a “bowdlerization” tag. It’s going to come in handy.
So, to which version do the new owners hold rights? The new or the old?
Time for someone to start printing and selling the original version. The copyright has been abandoned by the new owners.
Just leave the books alone. Dahl didn't want his books rewritten, while he was alive. So now he's dead you'll ignore his wishes. Why?
This is something they would do in the old USSR. How much longer before "counter-revolutionaries" get airbrushed from old photos and movies?
Bowdlerizing is fine so long as it is done in the politically correct fashion.
BTW, when company invented a way to delete profanity and blasphemy from Hollywood films, the producers got angry and sued the company and stopped the practice. Their artistic vision included saying fuck, shit, Goddman, Jesus Christ, and cunt, and its was against copyright law to put out a different clean-up version. This was NOT about Money.
All the liberal/leftists supported the Hollywood producers. How dare anyone change their films. Where are these liberal/leftists now?
Relax Jack. There are 10 versions of the Bible. If the Bible can be written, well then any book can. But be upfront about it: The Twits (niv).
Can't the Roald Dahl estate sue somebody over this?
@gilbar--That is not a real Tolkien quote. It was spread around the internet when the shitty Amazon Rings of Power came out.
It is close to something Frodo says to Sam in LOTR:
“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don't think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined and twisted them, and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures.”
The left promotes mutilating children to advance their sexual revolution, but changing the wording of a beloved book is beyond the pale. Nice boring neutrality you have there, I'd hate to see anything happen to it.
"Turns out being Orwellian with the technology of the 2020s means you can be way, way more Orwellian then you could be with the technology of the late 1940s."
New! Improved! Ten pounds of Orwell in a five pound bag!
"Commenter Mark justifies this under the belief that because Dahl was an anti semite his work is fair game. I don't like where that line of unreasoning is taking us."
No Wagner, Chopin or Richard Strauss. Probably the same for Beethoven and most of the German composers.
On the bright side, no more Martin Luther, either!
Credit where it's due: Salman Rushdie has come out strongly against the changes to Dahl's work.
Perhaps losing an eye to a different group of censors has emboldened him.
All I want is consistency. Not only was Dahl a Jew hater, but his works portray Jews offensively. Just read The Witches. So, this is a different case from a Jew-hating author whose works do not manifest the author's prejudices. Should school children be reading books full of anti-Semitic tropes? Well, should school chilren be reading books full of anti-gay or anti-black tropes? Why is Jew hatred treated differently?
Personally, I am a purist when it comes to free speech. However, when the powers that be censor only some offensive speech, a very bad message is being conveyed -- something like hating Jews is not like hating other groups and is, in fact, acceptable.
"Commenter Mark justifies this under the belief that because Dahl was an antisemite his work is fair game. I don't like where that line of unreasoning is taking us."
So, a fascist has a fascist opinion of a fellow fascist. Is that unusual? I dunno. Let's ask Ernst Röhm!
(Apparently, Mark has either bugged out voluntarily or otherwise, but a good jab is always in good taste.)
I’m almost speechless at this insanity - for that is truly what it is.
Yet another reason to not throw away physical books.
Remember when the US attorney general censored statues (not statuTes, but, y'know, 3-D representations of human figures, 'statues') ?
https://napavalleyregister.com/news/ashcroft-wants-drapes
-on-nude-statues/article_8e1035cb-b15b-507b-af17-9de4004b2807.html
ErmehGERD the horrors reported in and by the news media...
"All I want is consistency. Not only was Dahl a Jew hater, but his works portray Jews offensively."
LOL. And Nathanial West, Bellow, and Mailer hated Gentiles. Prove me wrong. But don't worry, someone will take the bait, and write a 3 page memo on how he REALLY loved the Jews.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10283521/Now-1984-gets-feminist-retelling.html
Can't wait.
This bowdlerization of a prominent (deceased) author is obscene.
Isn't it a violation of copyright? Did Dahl's estate sign off on this?
So the fact that Dahl was an anti-Semite is a justification for bowdlerizing his work?
That's an argument for suppressing all of Ezra Pound's poetry. And censoring all of the other authors who held currently-unfashionable political views.
(Not that I'm excusing anti-Semitic views -- just advocating on behalf of literature).
"And Nathanial West, Bellow, and Mailer hated Gentiles. Prove me wrong." Actually, you need to provide examples.
Robert Cook said...
"Under this reasoning taking a 'Magic Marker' to the Mona Lisa is totally justified."
"No, not at all. The reasoning for bowdlerizing Dahl's language is to hide language in the originals presumed to be offensive, covering it over with band-aids of replacement language presumed to be inoffensive. What might one find offensive about the Mona Lisa, and how would adding a Magic Marker mustache obscure or mitigate whatever offense one might propose?"
Who determines what is offensive? I'll let my own judgement determine what is offensive or not. Everybody else can just fuck off.
I hope these people are haunted by Roald Dahl's ghost for as long as they live.
As the stories go, he was quite the asshole. And assholes make good ghosts.
cassandra lite,
The people doing this would be clamoring to have all his work burned instead of edited if Dahl had talked about blacks the way he did Jews. This douchebag thought Jews had brought on the Holocaust themselves. Hitler, he said, "didn't just pick on them for no reason."
I don't think so. Dahl undoubtedly was anti-Semitic in private life, but this cute little bowdlerizing stunt is almost stunningly unrelated to that. I have not seen a single change made to Dahl's texts that has any relation to anti-Semitism. They are all about race, gender, and fat-shaming. And by "race" I mean that you can't refer to a black tractor or someone "turning white as a sheet" with fear. By "gender" I mean that mothers and fathers become "parents," and the word "female" is out (to be replaced by the "adjectival 'woman'," naturally), and we have to imagine that the Oompa-Loompas are 50% female -- except that that word is out! (I don't really want to know what they did to the Vermicious Knids.) And by "fat-shaming," I mean that the word "fat" is banned. Augustus Gloop is no longer "enormously fat," just "enormous." Presumably his gluttony had no effect on his waistline, but did make him eight feet tall.
If there were a single example of anti-Semitism in Dahl's books (as opposed to his private correspondence) that had been "remedied" by this campaign, you'd think that by now someone might have located it. I have seen none at all so far.
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