Bitch and The Great Switcheroo are both great stories. Can’t remember if they’re dodgy but no doubt they will be.
It's about self-censorship by copyright holders for commercial reasons, though. So I would say the idea that there's a slippery slope towards a future where anyone will have the power to censor anything according to their personal political views. The number of Nazis who can censor a children's book is a factor of how many Nazis control the publishing of children's books
sorry not got time to post a clever alternative but basically i see it as a case by case basis whereas the poll forces quite absolute positions ("most/all") - its not that bad a poll tbhLOL
I was out and about when I was creating it.
Just out of interest, how do you believe the poll should have gone? I want to know what wasn't represented properly.
Personally, I wanted to distinguish adult lit. from child lit. and I also wanted to only focus on past authors, particularly the greats.
I find people's replies/votes interesting as right-leaning people/press seem to want to pin this on the overcontrolling 'loony left'.
I would call this site predominantly left-leaning and there's a sizable amount of people here who basically voice the same concerns - meaning, on a fundamental level it's wrong to mess with past authors' work. Warnings may be fair play, but generally the past should be seen in the context of the past.
I'm not saying that's everyone's view but seems significantly represented here.
I said that Nazis were an example. I should have said a bad example.
My daughter, 8, wanted the whole RD collection, so she ended up with that too. Not sure if it's for her. Is it a good read for adults? Is it one for adults to read to their kids?
Think point here is it's the publishers doing this as they're worried this is the course of action people will take otherwise and they want their intellectual property to keep earning.
But is this kind of censorship generally what people want from either side of the political spectrum? Clearly it's the kind of thing conservatives hate and, going by this thread, such action is not that popular all round, tbh.
That's my guess, presume the demographic buying kid's lit is not the same as the one wringing its hands about wokeness gone mad.
its because a kids publisher would ask words like Fat to be changed now, and they're applying current children's editorial standards to books they still sell shit tonnes of.
arse over tit. Did you completely miss decades of books about being gay being banned? Lolita, Last Exit to Brooklyn? The lecturers dismissed for being commies? Pure ignorance.
Sure, I understand. But I think at least many people feel differently when the author is aware of the confines due to the context they find themselves in and negotiate them as they write or at edit level.
Sorry, what's the kind of thing conservatives hate? Censorship? As said above, conservatives historically have been the censors.
Those of us of a certain age remember the public ridicule concerning Mervyn Griffiths-Jones utterance is this "a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”. I couldn't wait to get my mitts on it, when I did it was the biggest disappointment ever. The prosecution was right, it was no work of wonderful literature, simply a poorly written vehicle for smut.
They're not doing it to be popular. They're replacing words that have become old-fashioned because of changing standards or because they have fallen out of use over the decades, so that parents don't think "This is a bit off-colour and l'd rather not buy another Roald Dahl book in future" and kids don't think "What the hell does calling the operator with my last shilling mean, I'm all confused and I don't like this author."
I meant conservatives hate this current tinkering with RD's work and their cherished classics. Wasn't trying to make any wider claims about conservatives and censorship.
lol re. shilling
I think the controversy is about very little, tbh, as controversies often are.
If you're interested in that side of Dahl, I'd recommend the LRB article that Diamond helpfully posted upthread, it's pretty interesting on how the darkness of Dahl's work was a reflection of his own experiences of grief and loss: Colin Burrow · The Comeuppance Button: Dreadful Mr Dahl · LRB 15 December 2022
I mean, I've got a bit more sympathy for this line of argument than I might have had a few years ago, but I think you still need to fill your point out a bit. (Also, "reactionary" is not the same as "reactive", there's more to being a reactionary than just someone who has a reaction to something.)
Mike Teavee, surely?
