Bold Thinkers

[Jim Goulder]

Ian Fleming's estate issues statement supporting controversial edits: 'It is something he would have wanted' | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/ian-fleming-james-bond-rewriting-statement-b2290950.html

James Bond fans rage at Ian Fleming book 'censorship' - 'Give me a break!' | Books | Entertainment | Express.co.uk https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/books/1739975/james-bond-books-censored-edits-ian-fleming-daniel-craig


To: "Goldfinger" (Title song from the 1964 James Bond film
Goldfinger) [John Barry, music; Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, lyrics]

Goldfinger
https://youtube.com/watch?v=zL0K_Zt3mf8&feature=share??

Totally...James Bond - Goldfinger (Instrumental)
https://youtu.be/mfPrxb5KI38


VERSE 1

Bold thinkers! We delete the N-word where it occurs; we strike out slurs,
That some folk singers wouldn't voice,
Because they are fully woke; they'd rather choke!


BRIDGE 1

We believe readers have to be kept,
From the bits where Bond has overstepped.
The foul language he is employing,
Shouldn't keep us from enjoying,
Goldfinger or its ilk. The sections where Bond is mean:
We pick 'em clean!


BRIDGE 2

Even though Bond has lasted this long,
Tell us why it is suddenly wrong,
To assure that Bond is never offending,
Modern readers by amending,
Goldfinger or its ilk. The sections where Bond is mean,
We have to screen.


OUTRO

There's no in-between.
We will screen.
Make it clean.
Bond works for the Queen.
Bond's obscene.
Bond is mean!

[Gary McGath]

On 3/7/23 3:12 AM, Jim Goulder wrote:
> Ian Fleming's estate issues statement supporting controversial edits: 'It is something he would have wanted' | The Independent
> https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/ian-fleming-james-bond-rewriting-statement-b2290950.html
>
> James Bond fans rage at Ian Fleming book 'censorship' - 'Give me a break!' | Books | Entertainment | Express.co.uk https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/books/1739975/james-bond-books-censored-edits-ian-fleming-daniel-craig
>
>

It's the new age of bowdlerization. Penguin Random House issued a
sanitized edition of Roald Dahl, then backed down halfway and said
they'd keep the original versions in print alongside them.


--
Gary McGath http://www.mcgath.com

[Paul Rubin]

Gary McGath <ga...@mcgath.com> writes:
> It's the new age of bowdlerization. Penguin Random House issued a
> sanitized edition of Roald Dahl, then backed down halfway and said
> they'd keep the original versions in print alongside them.

As I heard it, the sanitized version is a Puffin edition. Puffin is
Random House's line of kids' books. The Penguin line is adult fiction
and the backdown was to publish the unsanitized Dahl books under the
Penguin imprint, so you get to choose which one you want.

I figure that kids' books are only partly works of literature. They are
also instructional, since part of their purpose is to help kids learn to
read. So in that sense they are like textbooks. Textbooks get updated
all the time, so updating kids' books to deal with changing environments
seems legit to me.

"Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine" was in the news recently. It was
written in the 1950s and was about kids programming a vacuum tube
computer. An updated edition with modern computers would arguably be a
good thing. Cleaning up any outdated jargon and needless offenses seems
fine to do at the same time. A lot of 1920s-era blatant racism was
revised out of the original Hardy Boys mysteries starting in the 1950s,
and I don't think anyone made a fuss.

The main thing is to not try to suppress the original editions for those
who do want them for whatever reason. The big offender in that
department is George Lucas, who went to great lengths to stop anyone
from ever re-watching the original Star Wars movie where Han shot first.

[Gary McGath]

The big villain is long copyright. Books from the sixties and even the
thirties are still in copyright, their authors are mostly no longer
around to defend them, and the copyrights are in the hands of people who
only want to maximize income from them.

When a work is out of print, anyone can produce a bowdlerized edition,
and someone else can produce an authentic edition, preserving every
illustration, dirty word, and typo from the original.

Another issue is that there's too much focus on words rather than
content today. While researching my blog post on Dahl, I read the
beginning of "The Witches" and was horrified at how the authorial voice
replicates the witch-hunt mentality of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The narrator stresses how any nice woman the reader meets
might actually be a murderous witch. He says, "Oh, if only there were a
way of telling for sure whether a woman was a witch or not, then we
could round them all up and put them in the meat grinder."

No amount of changing the words, short of completely rewriting the
story, takes that mindset away. The bowdlerized edition has witches
infiltrating society while holding prestigious jobs rather than
low-level ones, but that changes nothing.

In the original version of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," the
Oompa Loompas were African Pygmies. He changed that one himself (under
pressure), but nothing takes the creepiness away from having foreign
workers who can never leave the factory.

We need to understand these authors for what they were rather than
covering them up with cosmetic changes.

[Tim Merrigan]

On Tue, 07 Mar 2023 16:16:35 -0800, Paul Rubin
<no.e...@nospam.invalid> wrote:

>A lot of 1920s-era blatant racism was
>revised out of the original Hardy Boys mysteries starting in the 1950s,
>and I don't think anyone made a fuss.

The Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew, books were, and are, being constantly
revised, anyway. For one thing they've been c~18 years old for around
100 years.
--

Qualified immunity = virtual impunity.

Tim Merrigan

--
This email has been checked for viruses by AVG antivirus software.
www.avg.com

[Paul Rubin]

Tim Merrigan <tp...@ca.rr.com> writes:
> The Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew, books were, and are, being constantly
> revised, anyway. For one thing they've been c~18 years old for around
> 100 years.

Dunno about Nancy Drew but the Hardy Boys have aged a little. According
to the Wikipedia article about those books, they were 14 or 15 in the
early editions and were aged up to 17 or 18 in the revisions.

I didn't realize the books were being constantly revised in the sense of
the individual titles being revised repeatedly. I had thought there was
a huge revision project that took place from the 1950s to the 1970s or
whatever, where the books (100's of them) were revised one at a time.

I similarly would be surprised if the original Batman comics could be
published today, where Robin was a minor and Batman constantly let him
get into danger.

[Tim Merrigan]

The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Mix, et al were always contemporary
with when they were written, which is why there are 100s of the books.
And they updated attitudes, and technology, etc. over time. (In the
recent Tom Mix TV series, Tom, and most of his friends, were Black,
for instance.)

And Robin was still a minor in the "silver age" (1960s), when I was
reading them, though he was introduced in the '30s or '40s, shortly
after Batman himself. Also, the later Robins, after they aged Dick
Grason out of the title (there have been at least four others) were
minors when they started. Also the mainstream superhero comics aren't
exactly sticklers for continuity.