The Glade 4.0

http://shelf-life.ew.com/2011/01/03/huc ... it/?hpt=T2



Context and insight into a particular age of America also matters you gorram dimwitted ****!

Gorram!

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Dream as if you'll live forever...
...Live as if you'll die tomorrow

Vivere Senza Rimpianti

Time to go hide my copy of blazing saddles before they get a hold of that.

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

It wouldn't surprise me if it was up on the chopping block at some point.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

I doubt it, Blazing Saddles isn't in the public domain.

Just means it'll get banned, instead, heh.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Why should I care?

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

This. The book is public domain. It's not like its original text will become unavailable. Hell, this will likely just cause more people to go read the original due to the bit of publicity it will get.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I have a sudden urge to publish a new edition of Huckleberry Finn that consists of the original run through the classic jive converter...

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I think I'll republish Huckleberry Finn as a Cyberpunk thriller, drifting down the currents of the Internet.


The only reason I'm bothered is that I suspect that the edited version will become the norm as far as what's taught in class, as "concerned parents" demand it, crying, "Think of the children!"

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

This...this could actually be made to work. I mean, stranger things have happened. Consider "Wicked".

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Oh, I don't doubt it could work. What makes my intention heinous is that I wouldn't rebrand it, as it were. This is Huckleberry Finn as Twain meant to tell it.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Huckleberry Tron

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Blackberry Finn

Ninja Edit:

Tron Sawyer

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Threadwin.

To play a sort of devil's advocate here, you can have an argument for changing the text that isn't rooted in political correctness.

It's actually a bit of a curious issue. Some words change in meaning over time... some a little, some a lot. Many of the older ones aren't even part of everyday vocabulary anymore. If an ignorant reader would get ahold of a book with a lot of these words, they'll come away with a rather wrong impression of what the author was intending to convey.

So... how do you get around that problem?

Annotations? Hope the reader has someone around that can explain it to them? No solution at all and let the reader be a bit confused? Something else maybe?

Does the answer vary depending on what you're working on at a given time? Certainly annotations seem appropriate for old Roman texts, but perhaps they are too much if you're trying to attract 12 year olds to read more. Unless you're appealing to the 12 year old Roman text reading nerd market segment, anyway. :p

One thing is for certain though -- the original text must remain, and remain somewhere accessible. Whether you're talking Mark Twain or Tacitus, this is pretty much an unarguable constant.

Or the adult version: Pr0n Sawyer

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The Dude abides.

Is this for real? I can't see educators or anyone else actually using this book.

Huckleberry Finn has been banned from half the schools in North America for a couple decades at least. I could totally see an educator using this rewrite.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

You educate the reader. This can be accomplished with footnotes, introduction, etc.



Yes.

As long as the book is published as an updated version or something where it is obvious that it's NOT the original text, then I have less of a problem with it. But the way I read the article was that they were going to change the wording and still sell it as the original which is wrong in the extreme.

They worry about the N word in a text where it is used in context- yet in a 3 minute rap song I can hear the N word more times than it appears in the whole book- and that's protected as artistic expression.

Awesomesauce

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

Hannibal,

There is a logical reason for that:

Kill Whitey!

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

I heard an interview on NPR last night with Alan Gribben the professor that has been spearheading this effort.

His claim is that his primary goal was to provide a book that would be able to be used in the public schools so that more people could be exposed to the work. Apparently he was unaware of how banned the book was from a public school standpoint and that is what moved him to action.

I still think he's wrong, and by changing the work you're not providing an accurate picture of what America was like in that time period, but I can appreciate what his goal was. I just think that it's the wrong way to go about it.

Actually, I heard an interview with him as well. He's targeting only a very small segment of the reading population, and he has clearly stated that he would prefer that schools use the unaltered text (his intro to this edition supposedly recommends this as well).

He doesn't want schools to stop using the book altogether, and have students completely miss out on the book's message. He just wanted it to be an option for schools that wouldn't use the book at all otherwise.

That being said, it's not as though people can't choose to buy the original. He hasn't asked for all versions of the book to be replaced with this one. Hopefully, this minor controversy will actually steer people to read the original book. It's not exactly hard to find. (I have it in hardback and on my Kindle.)

(Personally, I'd prefer that schools thumb their noses at parents challenging classics like this.)

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When he's underwater does he get wet? Or does the water get him instead?