Stop right there
What was that we were saying about free speech? About internalized censorship? About the idea that laws against ‘blasphemy’ and ‘defamation’ of religion make genuine free speech impossible?
I am in receipt of notes from the copy-editor of Does God Hate Women? on the subject of “possible defamation/points of contention that could cause offence.” There are eight items; all but two ask about ‘defamation’ of or ‘inflammatory’ statements about Islam; none are about the Vatican, the Southern Baptist Convention, the FLDS, Hindutva, Orthodox Judaism, or any other religious outfit or religion discussed in the book. The passages questioned, like the book as a whole, is heavily referenced, while ‘defamation’ refers to false statements. In short – internalized censorship is alive and well and flourishing.
I’d say that what you tell us is outrageous, but it’s too normal to be outrageous. Very sad. When is your book scheduled to appear? I’d like to buy it when I travel to New York this spring (northern hemisphere).
June. Unless of course wrangles about ‘defamation’ clog up the works.
It’s sad and peculiar. What about the pen is mightier than the sword? What about the truth-investigating journalists we admire? Aren’t books supposed to make us think? Give us points of view to think about?
And. . .again I wonder. . . If Religion X or Y or A is so great and powerful and full of truth and peace, etc etc, why worry? Honestly what the hell are they worried about? It’s pathetic.
Since when can books not contain “points of contention that could cause offence”?
for those interested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation
Claire, didn’t you know? There’s no such thing as “truth” anymore. There’s only YOUR truth and MY truth. Everyone’s truth deserves respect, because there’s no way to tell who’s right (because there’s no such thing as being right anyway). Everyone’s truth, except for the people who think that there IS such a thing as truth, that is. And those people are unenlightened arrogant imperialists who should be forced to shut up.
All that aside, do they mean they won’t publish, or that ‘there are concerns so pretty please nice it up?’ but they will still publish?
If the worst comes to the worst, you could leave pages in the book bereft of type, except for the notice, “This page intentionally left blank.”
You could then publish the deleted material here, where we could print it out, and paste it into the blank pages.
It’s not clear to me what it means. It’s not even clear to me what business it is of the copy editor’s, or why the copy editor provided such notes, or whether that is normally part of a copy editor’s job. The real editor thinks it won’t be much of a problem…but it’s under discussion.
At any rate, we’re not going to water it down.
You probably don’t need my advice, but when negotiating, it’s often wise to give in on something that doesn’t matter in order to gain something that matters: for example, insist that the passages in question cannot be modified, but that you love the copy-editor’s (you’ve never met anyone with such a keen sense of punctuation) idea of using semi-colons instead of commas in long sentences, etc.
Hah – can’t be done, I’m afraid; as usual the copy editor’s sense of punctuation is worse than mine, and I’m not going to say otherwise. (As usual, the copy editor introduced bad punctuation which I had to correct.)
It doesn’t signify. We’ll make changes we think can be made and not others, that’s all. We’re not going to negotiate.
Ophelia: I wish you well. By the way, copy-editors read blogs, so it might be a good idea to delete some of my and perhaps some of your comments.
I have no doubt that the copy-editor’s sense of punctuation is worse than yours. I was merely emphasizing a non-essential point, punctuation, where one could yield rather than yielding over a major point, content. In any case, I solidarize with what you and Jeremy are going through. Censorship is no joke nor did I want to present it as a laughing matter. It must be a nightmare to write a well-documented book and then see it decimated by a cowardly copy-editor, who can’t even punctuate.
Elliot,
“this comment intentionally left blank because some pig-ignorant…” URghhh yurk thud
“Primum non nocere” is a good principle when copy editing, I find. ;-)
Wilders wants to ban the Koran, so banning him has a certain regularity to it. Now if our enlightened (sic) leaders would just show the same regularity to all the other enemies of free speech they let in…