RWels
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Posts: 2,717
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Post by RWels on Feb 21, 2023 14:23:14 GMT
There are always going to be some in favour of almost anything. Or perhaps it's the opposite, isn't it. Some parents apparently prefer books without fatshaming etcetera. You may think they are wrong but in essence that's your opinion against theirs. Assuming that the publisher read the signs correctly, that is. The problem is that this publisher wants to keep selling books to as many people as possible now and in future (or you may rephrase that as: cares more about money than integrity). Perhaps they could sell it in two versions. A "Soppy Snowflake Edition" for mental cowards, and another one for tone deaf complaining oldtimers.  |
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Post by John Wall on Feb 21, 2023 15:04:52 GMT
There are always going to be some in favour of almost anything. Or perhaps it's the opposite, isn't it. Some parents apparently prefer books without fatshaming etcetera. You may think they are wrong but in essence that's your opinion against theirs. Assuming that the publisher read the signs correctly, that is. The problem is that this publisher wants to keep selling books to as many people as possible now and in future (or you may rephrase that as: cares more about money than integrity). Perhaps they could sell it in two versions. A "Soppy Snowflake Edition" for mental cowards, and another one for tone deaf complaining oldtimers. At the end of the day the market will decide. |
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RWels
Member
Posts: 2,717
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Post by RWels on Feb 21, 2023 15:24:36 GMT
At the end of the day the market will decide. And yet somehow you've not reassured me... |
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Post by John Wall on Feb 21, 2023 15:30:41 GMT
At the end of the day the market will decide. And yet somehow you've not reassured me... It reassures no-one. It may be that an updated, censored, rewritten Dahl is a big hit. Clearly Netflix, who’ve spaffed 500m - $ or £?, and Puffin think so. |
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Post by nathangeorge on Feb 21, 2023 17:07:53 GMT
I don't suppose all the Roald Dahl completists out there will want to miss these revised editions... I'm sure the fact the publishers are now guaranteed to shift a few hundred thousand copies of these pld stories this year never entered into their decision-making process here at all! Everything is done for money. I'd be very surprised if they give a penny fig for diversity or inclusion, outside how many more millions they can make from a dead man's set of stories. Never kid oneself into thinking capitalists care about anything except money. ‘Calling all kids and young at heart adults! Remember Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, etc by Roald Dahl? Well now you can buy inferior versions of these timeless classics specially ruined for modern times!!!’ I should’ve been in marketing…  Puffin’s motives for this may well be cynical if not disingenuous but if they really do believe this is going to be a money spinner for them then I fear they’re being a tad optimistic. Puffin are still printing the books and are making the changes to 'future proof' them or make them more palatable to certain readers now and in the future If profits played no part at all in this they would,as has been suggested elsewhere, simply allow the books to go out of print. The furore over the changes is good publicity for their polished up reprints and they will shift a lot of units off the back of it. They knew the storm it would cause - I'm not saying Puffin are deliberately bating people - but they must have predicted there would a publicity-generating backlash. That's not cynical. That's just business. I dismay. You got The Guardian waving the flag for the left of centre folks saying 'woop now we can all enjoy these wonderful books' and the Daily Mail on the other side saying 'Brits are furious'. Both represent a minority. Most do not care. Many are too busy trying to survive to worry about such trifles. Most Brits do not care that ambulances are arriving after people have died or deteriorated beyond medical help whilst waiting to get in the hospital door, so really who are these people dancing in the streets / throwing their hands up in dismay? But then why let real life get in the way of framing anything as another feature battle in the culture wars. |
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Post by John Green on Feb 21, 2023 17:26:19 GMT
Is that a worthwhile link to open? Or is it just people bashing it without any more background or analysis? I check out the Mail and the Guardian every day, and not only because they're free. (Not forgetting the Mail on Sunday, which has a different editorial line). I couldn't see in the Guardian's take on the story, that they mentioned the Beria/Bering Straits edit where Conrad (a Pole who wrote in English) and Kipling were replaced by an American and Jane Austen as Matilda's favourite authors. "On this day in 1953, LAVRENTIY BERIA met his end. Stalin himself had died nine months earlier, and his chief henchmen were turning against each other. Beria, Stalin’s chief of the secret police (NKVD), was arrested on charges of treason and tried in secret. And then shot. It’s not easy to work up sympathy for such a bloodthirsty killer. But the rest of the story is truly bizarre. Less than a month later, the Soviet Encyclopedia sent a notice to subscribers enclosing new pages. In translation, it said the following: The State Scientific Publishing House of the large Soviet Encyclopedia recommends that pages 21, 22, 23, and 24 be removed from Volume 5 as well as the portrait [of Beria] between pages 22 and 23 to replace which the pages of the new text are enclosed. The aforementioned pages should be cut out with scissors or blade, leaving inside a margin on which the new pages can be pasted. The substitute pages were an article on the otherwise obscure Friedrich Wilhelm von Bergholtz and pictures of the Bering Strait. Subscribers dutifully cut Bering out of the encyclopedia. Failing to do so would be dangerous." blogs.reinhardt.edu/history/b-is-for-beria-and-bering-strait/This was pretty much Winston Smith's job in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'. |
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Post by John Green on Feb 21, 2023 17:49:08 GMT
Still working on the Dahl book-titles which need to be expunged. So far it's:
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. How can that be retained after that That Peter Kay Thing thing?
The BFG. Think of what unseemly thoughts those initials could engender!
James and the Giant Peach. Where's Finbarr Saunders when we need him?
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Post by sonnybh on Feb 21, 2023 22:13:58 GMT
A missed opportunity. They could leave it alone and add a section at the end discussing how times have moved on. Educational and interesting for kids... Whereas it's quite dishonest to censor some books but not others. and it’s bad to show the police up as unimaginative plodders! That's the least of the police's worried when we can hardly go a week without officers being found guilty of crimes that should have them kicked off the force without a pension & barred from any government employment! |
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Post by John Wall on Feb 21, 2023 23:23:59 GMT
and it’s bad to show the police up as unimaginative plodders! That's the least of the police's worried when we can hardly go a week without officers being found guilty of crimes that should have them kicked off the force without a pension & barred from any government employment! You’re right, there are certainly problems with some of today’s police although I hope it’s a relatively small number. |
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Post by Frank Shailes on Feb 22, 2023 0:21:43 GMT
Perhaps if idiots like Jeremy Clarkson, Julia Hartley-Brewer and John Cleese didn't keep provoking them, the "Woke Brigade" wouldn't feel such a need to stem the hate speech. Dahl was described as "notoriously anti-Semitic" on BBC radio recently, yet bizarrely his "wonky nose" description was left in which it was said is an anti-semitic jibe.
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Post by sonnybh on Feb 22, 2023 21:27:36 GMT
Perhaps if idiots like Jeremy Clarkson, Julia Hartley-Brewer and John Cleese didn't keep provoking them, the "Woke Brigade" wouldn't feel such a need to stem the hate speech. Thanks for stating the obvious, though it's obvious some people can't cope with a taste of their own medicine! |
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Post by John Green on Feb 22, 2023 22:14:49 GMT
Apparently, the French and Dutch publishers don't intend to censor the books: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/21/roald-dahl-books-characters-changes-lose-power-publisher/ www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/21/publisher-of-roald-dahl-books-in-french-no-plans-for-rewrite"Authors in France retain “droit d’auteur” author’s rights; these include “moral rights” that cannot be sold or renounced and are passed on to the author’s heirs. Moral rights include the right of authorship and respect for the integrity of the work. This includes “respecting the author’s name and not infringing on the work they have made”. While the author is alive, no changes can be made to their work without their consent; after their death the heirs can make changes. Antoine Chéron, a lawyer with ACBM, a Paris firm specialising in author’s rights, said it was not illegal in France to change a dead author’s works “but it is dangerous for culture”. “How far back should we go? Baudelaire? Voltaire? The Bible? If books are changed in this way they are not the original works. It’s not far off censorship,” Chéron said. “This is our artistic history. I would be in favour of completely getting rid of the work rather than changing it if we feel it offends current thinking, but again, where do you stop? Who decides what is now offensive or goes against current thinking? This seems to be an attack on artistic creation and freedom of expression.” |
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Post by John Green on Feb 22, 2023 22:22:38 GMT
Perhaps if idiots like Jeremy Clarkson, Julia Hartley-Brewer and John Cleese didn't keep provoking them, the "Woke Brigade" wouldn't feel such a need to stem the hate speech. Dahl was described as "notoriously anti-Semitic" on BBC radio recently, yet bizarrely his "wonky nose" description was left in which it was said is an anti-semitic jibe. From The Guardian: "Everything we ever needed to know about how to live our lives is most likely to be found in a Roald Dahl book. Not only did Dahl create some of children’s literature’s most unforgettable characters in tales that transcend the generations, what is perhaps most captivating about his work is that, beneath the wonderfully eccentric stories, there always lies a warm sentiment in his words to inspire both young and old. Here are some of the greatest philosophical quotes from one of our favourite authors of all time: ....(6) 'A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely'.” www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2015/nov/27/roald-dahls-greatest-philosophical-quotes-ever |
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Post by John Wall on Feb 23, 2023 12:24:24 GMT
Apparently, the French and Dutch publishers don't intend to censor the books: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/21/roald-dahl-books-characters-changes-lose-power-publisher/ www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/21/publisher-of-roald-dahl-books-in-french-no-plans-for-rewrite"Authors in France retain “droit d’auteur” author’s rights; these include “moral rights” that cannot be sold or renounced and are passed on to the author’s heirs. Moral rights include the right of authorship and respect for the integrity of the work. This includes “respecting the author’s name and not infringing on the work they have made”. While the author is alive, no changes can be made to their work without their consent; after their death the heirs can make changes. Antoine Chéron, a lawyer with ACBM, a Paris firm specialising in author’s rights, said it was not illegal in France to change a dead author’s works “but it is dangerous for culture”. “How far back should we go? Baudelaire? Voltaire? The Bible? If books are changed in this way they are not the original works. It’s not far off censorship,” Chéron said. “This is our artistic history. I would be in favour of completely getting rid of the work rather than changing it if we feel it offends current thinking, but again, where do you stop? Who decides what is now offensive or goes against current thinking? This seems to be an attack on artistic creation and freedom of expression.” Something that has just occurred to me is translations. Obviously Dahl wrote in English but there are presumably separate copyrights for the French, German, etc translations. A translation is an intellectual property as the translator will have made choices about the precise wording, idioms, etc to use. I also expect that a translation from the 2020s would be different from one in the 1960s - even if the same person was doing it - as language changes over time. |
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RWels
Member
Posts: 2,717
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Post by RWels on Feb 23, 2023 14:47:34 GMT
Antoine Chéron, a lawyer with ACBM, a Paris firm specialising in author’s rights, said it was not illegal in France to change a dead author’s works “but it is dangerous for culture”. “How far back should we go? Baudelaire? Voltaire? The Bible? If books are changed in this way they are not the original works. It’s not far off censorship,” Chéron said. Something that has just occurred to me is translations. Obviously Dahl wrote in English but there are presumably separate copyrights for the French, German, etc translations. A translation is an intellectual property as the translator will have made choices about the precise wording, idioms, etc to use. I also expect that a translation from the 2020s would be different from one in the 1960s - even if the same person was doing it - as language changes over time. Certainly bible translations changed over time!! When thou buildest a new house, then thou shalt make a battlement for thy roof, that thou bring not blood upon thine house, if any man fall from thence. "When thou buildest a new house, then thou shalt make a parapet for thy roof, that thou bring not blood upon thine house if any man fall from thence. Whenever you build a new house, you must build a railing for the roof so that you don't end up with innocent blood on your hands because someone fell off of it.  In other words, parapets and battlements are being cancelled!  |
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In other words, parapets and battlements are being cancelled! 