A Fresh Start

Let's see how long this lasts

Well, look. I’ve got this Substack, and I hardly ever do anything with it. Admittedly, every time I do it is SOLID GOLD, and thanks for all your letters saying so. But I do feel like I’m wasting an opportunity as badly as I’ve wasted my life in general.

February 20 might be a little late to be starting a new year, but all kinds of stuff’s been going on in 2023 up till now, so this is where I’m drawing a line under the past and making a fresh start to my substacking career. The plan is to put this out on a weekly basis - with the caveat that I have a decades-long history of planning to do things and then…

Well, anyway, that is the plan. I hope making this a proper newsletter-type thing will provide you with a bit of a diversion at the start of the week. And I hope you’ll share and link and tell everyone to subscribe and all that. Because the more people reading, the easier it is to keep writing.

Anyway, I want to do more in this first edition of the New and Improved Seemly Takes than just tell you about how it’s new and improved, so let’s do some stuff.

The weekly Fury

For a man looking to get angry about something, the past week has been a gift, thanks to the bottom-feeding invertebrates calling themselves publishers at Puffin, who have rewritten Roald Dahl’s books to be less “offensive”.

You know how people say “political correctness gone mad” and you laugh at them because they are crazy right-wing idiots? Puffin just gave every one of those idiots the moral high ground, because even if the term “political correctness” is too on the nose to use unironically anymore, something sure has gone mad. See one example:

Now, if you look at that and don’t think that these people are out of their goddamn gourds, then you are probably mentally subnormal enough to work for Puffin. Other changes include removing the word “fat” from every new edition - so Augustus Gloop is now “enormous”; not referring to Mrs Twit as “ugly”; making Oompa-Loompas gender-neutral; changing:

“She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling.”

to:

“She went to nineteenth-century estates with Jane Austen. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and California with John Steinbeck”.

Not to mention changing:

“Even if she is working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman”

to:

“Even if she is working as a top scientist or running a business”.

Now, I am sure anyone reading this is of at least average intelligence, and therefore doesn’t need to have it explained why this is all the most appalling bullshit. But just briefly:

If you change the words in someone’s book, it isn’t their book anymore. The new editions put out by Puffin are not Roald Dahl’s, they are the bastard offspring of Puffin’s cretinous staff and the talentless grifters at Inclusive Minds, which calls itself “a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature”, but which I, were I to be given the chance to butcher their work the way they butcher the work of others, would describe as “a pack of halfwitted Philistines who compensate for their own inability to create anything of lasting value by destroying what actual artists have done”.

The fact that almost none of what Puffin has altered in Dahl’s books is actually offensive - no real person gives a shit if a book has words like “fat” or “ugly” in it, whether a book makes a powerful statement in defence of women in wigs, or whether Matilda reads Kipling or not - is bad enough. The fact that the publisher thinks the fact someone could be offended by a passage in a book is reason to rewrite it is even worse.

If you think a writer’s work is simply beyond the pale - and if you think Roald Dahl’s is, you’re a Twit, but anyway - then don’t read it. If you’re a publisher and you think a writer’s work is beyond the pale, don’t publish it. If Puffin finds Charlie and the Chocolate Factory far too shocking for modern children to be exposed to, they should simply cease printing it. That would be a dick move too, but at least it would be honest, and it wouldn’t involve actual cultural vandalism.

Some will come at you with the argument that words have been changed in books for many years: they will even point out that the Oompa-Loompas were changed already, from black pygmies taken from Africa by Willy Wonka to a sort of magical race of pixie-folk.

To which, obviously, the answer is: Roald Dahl made that change HIMSELF. Authors have the right to change their own work. Nobody else does, especially when the author is dead and has no right of reply. If what is being done to Dahl’s work by Puffin has been done to others in the past, it was as wrong then as it is now.

Others will come at you with the argument that Roald Dahl was an appalling anti-Semite and therefore his books should be changed, because bigots do not deserve to have their work respected.

To which, obviously, the answer is: his anti-Semitic comments are not in the books under discussion, and they are not what Puffin is changing. If people don’t want to read books by anti-Semites, they don’t have to. But they have no right to hack the art of others to pieces in the belief that just because an author’s personal views prevent THEM from enjoying that author’s work, everyone else must bow to the same dictates.

I guess what I’m saying is:

Fuck Puffin. Fuck Inclusive Minds. Fuck the family of Roald Dahl who has allowed this to happen.

And fuck the modern-day Bowdlers who degrade art and insult the intelligence of readers in their self-righteous barbarism.

Fuck them right in their ears.

The Weekly Creativity

This week’s Creativity is an old story of mine which can be found in my book Handy Latin Phrases. Buy the whole book here.

Themroc van Harryhausen, Gnu-Buster

The kid looked down at the dirt and spat his tobacco out, killing a passing centipede instantly.

            'We movin' out?' the kid asked, trying not to show his impatience.

            Themroc van Harryhausen, the greatest gnu-buster the West had ever known, looked up from the fire where he was raking over the embers of the morning, swallowing the last of the toasted marzipan.

            'You're too eager, kid. I know, I was once like you.' Themroc looked at the sky, almost blinding in its mixture of bright blue and damnation orange, and felt tears prick the edge of his eyes. He refused to cry. He hadn't cried in nigh-on thirty years, and he wasn't about to start now. Standing and hitching up his belt, he applied his medicated eyedrops and blinked for an hour or so. Finally, he nodded to his protégé, and they made their way slowly to the horses.

            They were called horses, but Themroc knew, in that deep, elemental, dry-boned way, that they were horses only in name. In fact, the kid's was actually a dachshund. For himself, Themroc had secured himself a thoroughbred ibex, but as had always been the way amongst gnu-busters, the apprentice rode a dog. Some traditions were worth holding onto.

            The weary-faced 'buster allowed a smile to insinuate itself across his face with the memory of his own apprenticeship, when he himself had ridden tall in the saddle on a fiery shih tzu. That had been under the tutelage of the famous Portobello Siffredi, and in some ways they had been the happiest days of his life. In other ways they hadn't, for instance, the intermittent hand-holding and French kisses, but he was willing to forget that for the sake of the gnu-busting secrets Siffredi had vouchsafed him. Those days were long gone now, and Siffredi's mantle had been quietly devoured by Themroc himself. Some days, though...he wondered...

            The kid was looking at him strangely. It took a few minutes for Themroc to realise that this was because he had been captured by a lynch mob and hung from a tree during his previous musings. Shaking his head at the kid's bulging eyes and throaty gurgles, Themroc cut him down with his shiny gnu-machete, laid him gently on the savannah and kissed his eyelids tenderly.

            'Gotta watch for the mobs in these parts, kid,' he said after the young fellow had recovered and they were mounting up. 'Some people don't take too kindly to gnu-busting. Post-modernists and such. City folk. Russians. Franciscan monks.'

            'But gnu-busters built this land,' protested the kid, outraged at such goings on and suspecting, as always, that it was all Jack Kerouac's fault.

            Themroc sighed and stabbed his ibex in the neck to get it moving. 'Times are changing, kid,' he said wistfully and with a touch of lavender. 'The ranges ain't so open no more, the grass don't grow quite so tall, folks ain't free and easy with their vittles, the towns have swallowed up the prairie, the hippo's gone a-lookin' for greener pastures, and the nabob, well he just up and scuttled, y'all.'

            The kid was silent. He looked down at the neck of his dachshund, and stroked it thoughtfully. Not for the first time, he found himself wondering in his heart of hearts what Themroc was talking about. Sometimes it seemed they spoke a different language. Sometimes they did speak a different language, and it was Urdu. Some days all that was ahead of them was grass, heat, a herd of giraffes and an overdraft, and if it wasn't for his faith in gnu-busting as a man's pursuit, he would crawl into the bottom of a whisky bottle and make a model ship.

            Themroc noticed his partner's taciturnity. He reached over with the gnu-prod and shocked him with concern.

            'K, kid?' he asked, with the lazy southern drawl that he had picked up last week in a saloon. 'The gnus'll be comin' up by an' by.'

            'I'm fine, sir,' said the kid loyally as his arm slowly slipped from its socket due to a congenital disorder. 'Just doin' a mite thinkin'

            'Better wrap it up, son,' said Themroc, smiling evilly for the hell of it. 'Them gnus be comin' over the horizon, and there's bustin' to be done.'

            He spoke the truth. In two minutes time, they were the centre of a heaving, sweaty tornado of hoofs, horns, wild, unbridled grunting and whispered murmurings of romance and indiscretion. At the end of it, seventy fine gnus had been busted, and many hundreds more were dead. The kid, screaming wildly, was feasting on the remains, face covered with blood and pale as a midnight hamster. Themroc laid a weather-beaten glove on his shoulder.

            'None o' that, son,' he said. 'We came to bust these gnus for Mister Gramboko, and we done busted 'em. Now we bring 'em in, but let the rest bury their loved ones. Never step on a gnu's religious traditions, it shows disrespect. And out here, sometimes, respect's all a body's got to stop him becoming sexually confused.'

            'They're just gnus,' the kid protested, mouth full of the peculiarly sticky mass you get in gnu bladders. 'And ain't we gnu-busters?'

            'A gnu-buster don't despise the gnus he busts, kid. That's a lesson you gotta learn if'n ever you wanna get offa yer dachshund. We fight 'em, we bust 'em, we even kill 'em, but we respects 'em. We're like brothers. Who kill each other. Man and gnu gotta be able to look each other in the face, or else, there's no point to this crazy ol' world, and we may as well just go pick up whores in Nairobi. Treat 'em with honour, kid, it's the only way. It's the gnu-buster's code.'

            'What's the gnu-buster's code?'

            '3X-ZQF-40.'

            'And what does that mean, huh?'

            'You'll find out, son, you'll find out.'

            And Themroc, with a dig of his heels and a vibration of his thighs, wheeled his ibex around and headed for home. but in his heart he remembered the day he found out what the code meant, and the way his life was never the same afterwards, as family, friends, and motor function left him and he found himself out on that lonesome savannah, busting gnus, bedding women, eating spinifex and playing practical jokes on slow-witted zebras. Life could never stay in one place for a gnu-buster, not even the greatest the world had ever known. Because that world was changing, and no matter how many times he busted a gnu, trained an apprentice, married a Filipino or rode that long, lonesome trail from Cairo to Cape Town, the aching would remain. The aching that said...Themroc, your time has passed...

            He felt the pricking again. He wiped his eyes, dug his heels in, and rode...away.

Weekly Plugs

A plug for myself - tickets to my Melbourne Comedy Festival show, REBOOT, are on sale now.

A plug for someone else - Jonn Elledge’s Substack is very much worth subscribing to: Jonn is brilliant on UK politics, history, culture and Doctor Who. His reflections on English counties and train networks are particularly delightful. One of the top writers on the information superhighway in this amazing 21st century of ours.

Weekly Goodbye

Goodbye!