Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
I keep wondering if you have a different sort of apple pie than we do ... or maybe it's the cheese. I know McDonald's have something they call an apple pie that I would not have recognised as such, but I can't quite imagine cheddar cheese on that either.
|
A restaurant famous for its pies used to have printed on its napkins (and perhaps does to this day, if it still exists):
"Apple pie without cheese is like a kiss without a squeeze."
In our house, though, when I was growing up, we never ate cheese of any variety with pie of any variety. We'd never heard of such a thing. Vanilla ice cream, yes; cheese, no. And lo, these many years later, I have yet to so much as see a piece of cheese hobnobbing with a slice of pie.
And now if I may be so bold as to return to the subject of this thread:
My policy is, if it says Author XYZ on the outside, I want and expect Author XYZ on the inside. I want to know what Author XYZ wrote, pure and unfalsified, unfiltered and unchanged and uncut, and not what some officious committee or sensitivity reader, years after the fact, without the author's knowledge or consent, deems correct and proper and inoffensive to modern sensibilities. If an author or one of the author's characters perceived things in a certain way, or described things in a certain way, be it offensive to some or not, that's what I want to read. I find it presumptuous for someone who is, after all, just another person, to appoint themselves a kind of guardian of public morals or chief of language police who decides what's acceptable for everyone else, or what people nowadays can endure or ought to be exposed to. After all, if people don't like what an author writes, or how an author writes, they can lay the book aside and read one by somebody else. There seem to be enough out there.
It's such meddling that has made the term "do-gooder" not one of praise but of opprobrium.
Truth in advertising should dictate that any "sanitized" editions be clearly and prominently labelled as such, not just on the copyright page, but on the front and back covers and the title page. And you would think it goes without saying that sanitized editions should not automatically be substituted for the originals.