The Guardian
March 2, 2022 Frank Cottrell-Boyce Back in the days when everything took place on Zooms and Teams, I was part of a World Book Day event that was livestreamed from the set of the hit musical Matilda. The set is magical: a child’s swing with an explosion of books fire-working up behind it. Now, of course, Matilda has become a battlefield in the Roald Dahl chapter of our culture wars. It is worth noting that World Book Day has always been a battlefield. Every year teachers, carers and librarians defend the joy of reading from the forces of darkness. Almost as soon as someone suggested dressing up might be fun, predator supermarkets caught the scent of anxiety on the hurrying bodies of young parents and pounced, selling them bundles of single-use Where’s Wally costumes. But schools pushed back and now instead of parades of children dressed in expensive landfill, you’ll find schools where the pupils come dressed in their pyjamas and cosy up to listen to stories, making the day into one long dreamy sleepover. I’ve been to schools where, instead of parents or carers dressing up children, children are invited to dress wooden spoons, or their classroom door. Another where the teachers sat in their classrooms reading their favourite stories and the kids could chose which one to go and listen to. There are whole school book swaps. And “home and away” reading, where children from one class go and read to another. More ideas every year. Until the next enemy took the field. The pandemic. Then again schools rose to the challenge with online readings, and livestream events such as the Matilda one. Thameside primary in Caversham encouraged people to put book covers in their windows to make a trail around the area. I especially loved “Masked Reader” moments, when teachers disguised themselves with filters while reading favourite stories. ‘You can always move on to Narnia’ . . . The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005). Photograph: Phil Bray/Ronald GrantThis year, Leslie Manser school in Lincoln is making a food bank collection part of its World Book Day celebration because the latest threat to the fun is the cost of living crisis. I really hope that – apart from spreading light and magic – World Book Day throws some light on the impact this the crisis has on children. With money short, parents and carers are buying fewer books for their children. For previous generations this wouldn’t have mattered so much because they had libraries. Nowadays, one in seven primary schools don’t have anything resembling a library. Prisons are obliged to have libraries by law. Schools are not. The outgoing children’s laureate Cressida Cowell has spent the last few years fighting for her Life-changing Libraries campaign. It’s making a huge difference but it would have a been a lot easier if our media showed a fraction of the interest they showed in Roald Dahl’s vocabulary in our children. Sometimes advocating for children in this country feels like a niche enthusiasm instead of the future of the nation. Of course I know there are important issues behind the Dahl row. But whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of sensitivity reading, surely it’s equally important that all our children have access to a couple of shelves of books and a corner to read them in. The key to reading for pleasure is having a choice about what you read. As a child I disliked Dahl intensely. I felt that his snobbery was directed at people like me and that his addiction to revenge was not good. But that was fine – I just moved along to Joan Aiken, Moominland and Narnia. Today publishers such as Knights Of, writers such as Nadia Shireen, Elle McNicoll, Katherine Rundell, Phil Earle, Lissa Evans Onjali Q Raúf and Alice Oseman are pumping out masterpieces that would suit any sensitivity or none. I name the names – as Philip Pullman did when he was asked the question – because they don’t crop up enough in the national conversation. Tireless, heroic teachers will be doing that today (or tomorrow, perhaps). Children need to be pointed towards these books and they should be available in schools. Now that I’m grown up I can see that there are moments of real genius in Matilda. That first encounter with Trunchbull when – without having even seen her – she convinces herself that Matilda is the root of all her problems and whips herself into a fury about it, is both terrifying and prophetic. I think we’ve all learned what that combination of stupidity, power and vindictiveness leads to. But there’s still something about that book that niggles me. Matilda makes herself: she’s clever because she’s clever. This is something Dahl believed about himself. His breakthrough piece – Shot Down Over Libya – is the story of how he saved himself when he crashed his plane in the desert. Except he didn’t. He was saved by his co-pilot, whom Dahl wrote out of the picture. The truth is, none of us saves ourselves. We save each other. Or not. World Book Day is a chance to celebrate the power and pleasure of reading, to help our children build the apparatus of happiness within themselves. It should also be a day to ask ourselves whether we are doing right by our children, by our future. Because, to quote the smash hit musical Matilda: “If you sit around and let them get on top, you / Might as well be saying you think that it’s OK / And that’s not right.”
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Agence France-Presse
February 20, 2023 Novelist Salman Rushdie led condemnations Monday of Roald Dahl’s children’s books being re-edited for a modern audience, calling it “absurd censorship” by “bowdlerising sensitivity police.” Publishers Puffin have made hundreds of reported changes to characters and language in Dahl’s stories including making the diminutive Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory gender neutral and calling Augustus Gloop enormous rather than fat. Mrs. Twit in The Twits is also no longer ugly, but beastly instead, while the Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach are now “Cloud-People.” The criticism comes amid a growing trend for publishers to employ so-called “sensitivity readers” who work alongside editors to identify references to gender, race, weight, violence or mental health that might offend readers. A spokesperson for the Netflix-owned Roald Dahl Story Company, which controls the rights to the books, said it was not unusual for publishers “to review the language used” for new print runs and that its guiding principle had been to try to maintain the “irreverence and sharp-edged spirit of the original text.” But the edits sparked a wave of criticism. Rushdie, who lived in hiding for years due to a fatwa calling for his death over his 1988 book The Satanic Verses, said Dahl had been a “self confessed anti-Semite, with pronounced racist leanings, and he joined in the attack on me back in 1989. “Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed,” he wrote on Twitter. Dahl’s books have sold over 250 million copies worldwide. Some of his most popular stories have been turned into blockbuster films such as last year's “Matilda the Musical” and “The BFG” (2016) which was directed by Steven Spielberg. ‘Nasty, colorful glory’Suzanne Nossel, head of freedom of expression body PEN America, said she was “alarmed” by the edits. “Amidst fierce battles against book bans and strictures on what can be taught and read, selective editing to make works of literature conform to particular sensibilities could represent a dangerous new weapon. “Those who might cheer specific edits to Dahl’s work should consider how the power to rewrite books might be used in the hands of those who do not share their values and sensibilities.” Nossel said one of the problems with re-editing works was that “by setting out to remove any reference that might cause offense you dilute the power of storytelling.” “His Dark Materials” author Philip Pullman took aim at the influence of sensitivity readers on young authors. He said less established writers found it “hard to resist the nudging towards saying this or not saying that. “If Dahl offends us, let him go out of print,” he told BBC radio adding that millions of Dahl books with the original text would remain in circulation for many years whatever the changes to new editions. Others highlighted how the “nasty” elements of Dahl’s stories were exactly what made them popular with children. Laura Hackett, deputy literary editor of The Sunday Times newspaper, called the changes “botched surgery” and vowed on Twitter to hold on to her original copies so her children could “enjoy them in their full, nasty, colorful glory.” Even Prime Minister Rishi Sunak weighed in on the debate. “The Prime Minister agrees with the BFG that you shouldn’t gobblefunk around with words,” his spokesperson told reporters. The expression—meaning to play around—is a reference to a line spoken by the big friendly giant in the book. |
About TidbitsWe are including these tidbits as blog posts so that they are searchable. They do not relate specifically to book banning efforts, but they do seem relevant to issues of censorship and the misguided attempts to limit access to books that children want to read. Archives
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