61–70 of 112 posts
I'm hardly a SJW but it's 2022, can we stop equating rape which is a shockingly violent violation/assult of a real a human being with anything less. I'm sure I'm gonna get slammed for this but whatever.
I'm hardly a SJW but it's 2022, can we stop equating rape which is a shockingly violent violation/assult of a real a human being with anything less. I'm sure I'm gonna get slammed for this but whatever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got the impression that was the point, to exaggerate. But I can't help but wonder, would you had felt the same way had the author chosen other shockingly violent acts such as "disembowelment", "lobotomy", "castration", or "amputation"?
Those are also over the top, but comparing text editing to violent sexual domination is well past the American taste for absurd overstatement, and just comes across like a silly, blinkered person overly absorbed in their little drama. It works against the author's apparent interest. They throw the dials to 11 as a bit of norm-setting editorializing about supposed severity of the unjust edits, but it just ends up bein…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it common for editors to add to a writer's text? My naive assumption was that they often cut and re-structure and maybe suggest re-wording, but I'm surprised to see an editor actively add content that wasn't there at all
Editors do participate in revisions quite a lot and for them to suggest additions is probably common. To take a writer's work posthumously, change it so drastically that you've reversed the meaning of paragraphs ("I lost at the track" -> "I won at the track"), and then publish it as that author's work without their involvement, I think that's beyond the pale.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got the impression that was the point, to exaggerate. But I can't help but wonder, would you had felt the same way had the author chosen other shockingly violent acts such as "disembowelment", "lobotomy", "castration", or "amputation"?
Those do not happen to a sizeable fraction of the population. Rape does.
Why?
Perhaps John Martin thought he was doing Charles Bukowski a favor with his educated corrections but I find them atrocious. The publishing world is rife with this type editing work. The film world is replete with changes that butcher the original work and intent of the original creator. When watching a movie look for the director's cut if multiple cuts exist.
I mean...it kind of depends. As a history buff, I love the French plantation scene in the long version of Apocolypse Now Redux... I totally understand why it was removed from the original theatrical release, though. I think director cuts tend to play to the more 'hardcore' fans of a piece, and sometimes serve to make the work less accessible to more casual viewers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's 2022, can't we stop conflating analogies and metaphors with "morally equating"? When we "kill" a program there's no life murdered or equivalent moral issue involved either. But I don't take issue with the wording just because I've had a relative killed in a bad situation. And I don't think anybody should (or if they do, they should get over it).
At issue is not whether analogies and metaphors are a type of morally equating. At issue is whether it is appropriate to use a particularly severe term in a decidedly less severe manner. "Kill" is used in many less severe circumstances. We kill plants and mold and bacteria. "Kill" does not nearly universally refer a specific severe act with a real human victim. Notice we don't murder programs. Regardless of historica…
He literally used the word “equating”.
> Notice we don't murder programs.
And if someone does say that, will you swoop in to tell them that it’s inappropriate? Because I have absolutely heard people use the word “murder” metaphorically.
> And in this case, survivors are already telling us how they feel.
Interestingly those are all cases where I can easily imagine someone saying “murder” instead of “rape”. I also think those examples are pretty flippant and waste the impact of the word.
For the record, I think this particular use of the word “rape” to describe the poem’s butchering is reasonable. The work shown was utterly destroyed.
https://www.poetrynw.org/interview-serious-books-a-conversat...
It would be interesting to see how John Martin would explain those edits. They just look so bizarre, some invert the meaning completely, others are just petty edits to change stuff just for the heck of it.
It's like there was a love-hate relationship between the two. In interview I found above, John keeps talking about himself when asked how the two of them hit it together, or how it was like seeing Bukowski rise and his response was basically "It was great, but look how much work I was doing".
One could almost write a book about their relationship just based on the edits and reading into them all kinds of interesting things. It's like John hated the drinking and the vulgarity and try to correct some of it, but ended up ruining the work in the process.
People are rightfully pointing out how ridiculous some of the overt substantive changes in that end poem are, but I was pretty amazed by how even the quite minor changes totally alter the feel of the thing too. "Sit on a couch and look at a wall" to "Laying on the couch and looking at the wall" loses a lot somehow in a hard-to-pin-down way. It's almost an impressively efficient butchering
"Sit" is from Middle English sitten, from Old English sittan, from Proto-West Germanic sittjan, from Proto-Germanic sitjaną, from Proto-Indo-European *sed- (“sit”). "Lay" is from Middle English lay, from Old French lai, from Latin laicus, from Ancient Greek λαϊκός (laïkós). In English, "sit" feels immediate and active where "lay" is passive and indirect. The distinction is both important and rooted in history. It is…
'lay, v.1 General sense: To cause to lie.
[OE. lęcgan = OFris. ledsa, lega, leia, OS. leggian (Du. leggen), OHG. lecken, legen (MHG., mod.G. legen), ON. legja (Sw. lägga, Da. lægge), Goth. (= OTeut.) lagjan, f. lag- ablaut-variant of OTeut. leg-: see lie v.'
OE = Old English, OFris.= Old Frisian etc.