This is kind of a weird article. There were two cuts:
>There were mornings following marriage blackout nights
Maybe it's just me but I don't understand what this sentence means. I've never heard of a "marriage blackout night" and can't parse what it means.
The second cut was taking "the usual briefs and t-shirt" out of this sentence:
>The other day I was sitting on my bed, the usual briefs and t-shirt, camera on the lines of my face and the new grey of my beard, when my wife came in the room as she was taking off the t-shirt she’d slept in
"the usual briefs and t-shirt" is not a sexual statement.
From what I can tell they've taken edits meant to improve the flow of the paragraph and, for reasons I can't see, taken them as editing sex out.
Well he explains both what he meant by "marriage blackout nights" and he also says he knew it was an awkward translation that needed editing. So I submit that you may not have read this carefully enough.
The irony of this is delicious. You presume that the author had a "point" aside from the story that you mistook for a "long meandering path." One might wonder why an author would even care about reaching such an audience. Irony being that the author talked about exactly that cultural divide, but I'm guessing you missed that too.
> Maybe it's just me but I don't understand what this sentence means. I've never heard of a "marriage blackout night" and can't parse what it means.
The author explains the term and agrees it needs editing.
> "the usual briefs and t-shirt" is not a sexual statement
It makes the author's comment about his wife sexual. The author is suddenly fully clothed and mocking his naked wife, instead of sharing in their shared hungover, underdressed state.
You also fail to mention the second example which is explicitly sexual. It seems as though you didn't read it all.
As I read it, the author and wife both had t-shirts on, and the wife was taking hers off. There was no previous shared state where they were both less dressed than that.
Even more bizarre is that he feels the same! He agrees that this phrase needs editing and is still confused that it was flagged by his editor.
> In my version, that writer is also in his underwear, and the reader is informed that the couple is having some sad, drunken nights (« marriage blackout nights » doesn’t sound right and would have needed editing anyway, but bear with me).
>Even more bizarre is that he feels the same! He agrees that this phrase needs editing and is still confused that it was flagged by his editor.
Yeah, it's not like he spends 10 or more subtle paragraphs explaining both why he feels the phrase was important (despite needing editing for other reasons) and why he felt the shame (despite knowing he had not done anything shameful, except under a puritan gaze: he felt the shame because he was forced to view his prose under a different culture's understanding of sex).
As things are described, he writes paragraphs about his assumptions about the editor's reasoning for crossing out a nonsense phrase and fails to consider that the editor was not critiquing his artistic notions but rather just crossing off something that both of them agreed was bad. There's no particular evidence that the editor would not be amenable to simply rewriting the passage to make sense.
It was bad writing and the editor removed it. The fact that he felt shame doesn't make his assumptions any more valid.
>fails to consider that the editor was not critiquing his artistic notions but rather just crossing off something that both of them agreed was bad
That's because the editors they worked with, and others he discussed such things, had a pattern to cross off specific things (regardless of whether both author and editor agreed they were bad), and those "crossing offs" revealed not just an editorial hand, but also an underlying ethics/ideology behind what they chose to focus on...
>It was bad writing and the editor removed it. The fact that he felt shame doesn't make his assumptions any more valid.
Way to miss the whole argument. It's not even like he didn't spell it out...
> That's because the editors they worked with, and others he discussed such things, had a pattern to cross off specific things (regardless of whether both author and editor agreed they were bad), and those "crossing offs" revealed not just an editorial hand, but also an underlying ethics/ideology behind what they chose to focus on...
That's obviously not exclusively true. Otherwise the sole purpose of the editor would be pure ideological shifts. That would be dumb. Ergo I conclude most of the edits are just competent editor edits.
> Way to miss the whole argument.
And I'm saying the author seems like a sensitive soul that has jumped the gun far too quickly. His argument is incorrect.
>That's obviously not exclusively true. Otherwise the sole purpose of the editor would be pure ideological shifts.
That wasn't the argument I've made. I didn't say every edit suggestion was based on ideological shifts. I said that (actually, merely summed up the author's experience) they discovered a tendency for editors to also (keyword: also) make suggestions that not only result in ideological shifts, but have an ideology/ethics and not "how best to serve the text" or aesthetics as the underlying drive.
And some those corrections can even coincide with a "better expression" edit.
To make the claim perfectly clear:
(1) editors make mainly "better expression" edits
(2) they also make a certain class of ideology/ethics edits. Some of them they make them explicitly with ideology in mind (e.g. they find situation X, that is acceptable to a French sensibility as yucky because of their culture), and other times unconsciously as mere not understanding the point of the text (but again, not because it doesn't have one, but because of conceptions rooted in their culture about what is included, not some "universal" needs of the text).
(3) they make enough of the latter that the writer can see a pattern - also shared/expressed by other writers of the same culture as him (different to the editor's culture)
(4) many people reading about those, can't even understand that the latter kind of edits are of that kind, not only because the change might be suble subtle and they can't understand what's at stake, but also because they share the same ethics/ideology (in short: culture) with the editor.
I don't really care about your argument here. Mine is very simple. If you write a crap sentence a good editor will flag that sentence for being crap. Maybe the editor cared about ideology. Maybe they did not. But if they didn't flag that sentence they would be a bad editor. Because it was a bad sentence. For us to assume that there is additional reasoning behind it would be pure conjecture.
It's not a convincing piece of evidence to point out that an editor removed a nonsense statement as evidence that the editor has ideological motivations. It's not proof that they don't have ideological motivations. It's just an irrelevant edit of a bad phrase.
This feels like the classic Community scene in which Chang is trying to pitch "Bear Down for Midterms" as the school's slogan, and everyone says "What does that mean?" to which he tries to defend by asking if their issues with it are a race thing.
The author's thesis can be correct even if his evidence and persuasive reasoning are bad.
>I don't really care about your argument here. Mine is very simple. If you write a crap sentence a good editor will flag that sentence for being crap. Maybe the editor cared about ideology. Maybe they did not. But if they didn't flag that sentence they would be a bad editor
Well that's how editing works. I'd be charitable and say that, certainly, both I and the author know this.
On top of that, basic function, however, an editor can have other causes in mind for flagging a sentence (either explicit or unconscious motivation), besides it "being crap". And if they do this frequently enough, one can spot a pattern.
To put it another way, sure, a cigar is something people smoke. And sometimes "a cigar is just a cigar" as the quote goes. But also sometimes a cigar is NOT just a cigar. It was put conscisously as a phalic symbol, or even uncosciously so.
Similarly, an edit it's not always an edit - sometimes it's imposing an ideology behind the editing - even if it thinks it just removes a bad sentence.
Now, about the "no evidence" part.
Part of the essay is about how for some of those cases there's no evidence, but you can see it if you come from the right (constrasting to the editor) background. And where it's more obvious, there's still "plausible deniability".
It's more about about the emerging pattern of editing decisions that you get a feel for.
So, there's no "evidence" or "proof", in the sense of a court case or math, the same way you can't prove a comedian is funny to someone. They either find them funny or not, and there are no real arguments and explanations that can change their mind.
At best you can point that many agree with you and find said comedian funny (though, of course, that wouldn't convince anybody that the comedian is funny - it might just give them some doubt about them finding them unfunny, or merely make them think those "many" have no good humor either).
>The author's thesis can be correct even if his evidence and persuasive reasoning are bad.
Certainly.
Tho in this case, I think he makes a good case at the literature level: how what's conveyed changes by the proposed edits they point out.
And how even when the sentence is not good, the suggested edit doesn't propose an improvement that removes the "bad expression" and retains what's conveyed, but completely removes what was conveyed.
Not because they're a bad editor and don't have a feel for improving phrases while retaining their meaning in general, but because they have a different mindset/culture.
That is, the editors can handle the "improve-but-keep-meaning" fine for phrases where the ideology is not an issue, but get a "blind spot" when it is...
>Maybe it's just me but I don't understand what this sentence means. I've never heard of a "marriage blackout night" and can't parse what it means.
It means drinking inside the house into a blackout stupor (actual or not but meant for effect) during covid nights where you couldn't get outside.
>"the usual briefs and t-shirt" is not a sexual statement.
It's not to you, because of what the author already covered: you want sex to be a story, not a fact hanging in the air.
In other words, you look whether the description has an explicit a sexual purpose.
But this introduces nakedness and the human body without explicit sexual purpose. The sexuality is a background, not a plot, and the details help paint a picture, don't tell a story, and don't serve as plot devices.
That's also what the american editor couldn't understand - and for the same reasons.
> Maybe it's just me but I don't understand what this sentence means. I've never heard of a "marriage blackout night" and can't parse what it means.
The author explains a few lines after:
> In my version, that writer is also in his underwear, and the reader is informed that the couple is having some sad, drunken nights (« marriage blackout nights » doesn’t sound right and would have needed editing anyway, but bear with me). These are two expressions of, well, vulnerability.
Ah okay. IMHO the editors suggestion is way better. It's more impactful and to the point instead of diverging for a sentence about sad drunken nights:
>We used to do it without video, but last March we started feeling the need to be visible to one another. The need to be seen and acknowledged by people you respect.
>We used to do it without video, but last March we started feeling the need to be visible to one another. There were mornings following marriage blackout nights where you only wanted to be seen and acknowledged by people you respect.
also very weird use of French-style « guillemet » quotation marks?
(not weird because they're guillemets, just kinda weird because they're in an English language article and being used for emphasis instead of quotations)
The editors are not being puritanical. They're trying to illustrate to him that his writing (when read by an American) is adding context that he may not be trying to add.
For example, the bad parenting example at the bottom. He clearly illustrates that the author is simply capturing a scene as he imagines it, but the modern interpretation of an adult smoking and drinking in front of their child in the middle of the day is going to be interpreted as them being bad parents. If thats what he means to express, no one is going to complain about the inclusion of those details. If he doesn't WANT them to be cast as bad parents, don't include those details because they're not helping with the scene.
> The editors are not being puritanical. They're trying to illustrate to him that his writing (when read by an American) is adding context that he may not be trying to add.
And why is that? Because Americans are puritanical.
> but the modern interpretation of an adult smoking and drinking in front of their child in the middle of the day is going to be interpreted as them being bad parents.
For you (American?) it's the Modern interpretation while for others it might just be the American interpretation.
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I think it's just hard for people when being a product of a certain culture/society to see how said culture/society looks from the outside.
Compared to what's available on TV in western Europe, Hollywood is much more reserved. They may not be puritanical, but most of the religious right in America absolutely are, and they make up a large and loud majority. Janet Jacksons tassled nipple resulted in national controversy and outrage! Laws were passed because of it. BECAUSE OF A NIPPLE! People were screeching just a few weeks ago that Disney had ~24 frames of an animated married lesbian couple kiss, as if having a kid see someone give a quick peck to their partner will turn them into a flaming homosexual or want to switch genders.
We've come a long way here in usa, but we've got a ways to go.
Yeah, the nipple-phobia in Hollywood is really funny. Characters in Hollywood movies or TV shows somehow manage to have sexual intercourse without taking their underwear off.
I've always wondered about this. They just get into bed, clothes and shoes and all, despite having been outside and walked over all sorts of places. Why don't they at least take their shoes off? It drives me crazy, I've never seen anybody do this.
1. Americans are always on the run, living at much higher pace, ready to take off at moment's notice.
2. The US is located more to the south than Europe, so the climate is warmer and drier in most parts, so your shoes are much cleaner (no snow, no mud).
Or maybe it's just a movie convention: like they want the movie character to be able to take off without wasting time on finding their shoes. Similar thing happens with how phone calls are shown in movies: there's a very short greeting, and after the conversation is over people just hang off, no pleasantries at the end, in the interest of air time.
Without meaning to undermine your point, I think a greater proportion of married couples did sleep in separate beds back then. My grandparents had separate beds.
I'm from Spain. Zillions of people saw a bare nipple in the New Year's Eve late night show back in the day. That was about 35 years ago. And no one cared.
Every time a european tells me that they don't care about nudity I always ask them to strip or have their wife/gf lift up her shirt for me. They never do.
it's exhausting listening to Europeans make such a huge deal about how they don't make a big deal about sex.
but you don't show women's buttholes in advertising, so you draw a line one place; we draw the line another place. .But if you don't care about it and it's no big deal, then why is it such a big deal not to see nipples, it's like you have this need to see women's nipples or there's something wrong. In actuality, I think you have a need to act like and say that you don't think it's a big deal; but the European porn and titillation industry is quite robust, so the prurient interest is there.
Imagine observing American media, from nipplegate, to nipple-censoring, to Carlin's seven words, to censored and sanitized song lyrics in the radio and in the store, to warning labels about 'explicit lyrics', to hyperclean and sanitized Hollowood movie productions, to covered and hidden magazine covers - and still thinking the Americans, as a general default, are not puritanical. Thank you for that.
Imagine painting with a broad brush an entire nation’s worth of people, one with literally several or many times more people than name a European country.
We’re a country of many peoples with many values and that’s one of the reasons we fight so much. Pretty much everything you listed is a norm which evolved from a strict—and yes, sometimes puritanical view—to accommodations for different people from the heart of the Tennessee River Valley to the beaches of California.
We’re not all still partying like we’re fresh off the boat and it’s 1620. As clean as a Hollywood production might look to you, the people that made that movie were probably all living rather diverse lifestyles, many of whom might make a Roman at their peak blush. The Puritanism is still there, but so is a lot more than that.
> one with literally several or many times more people than name a European country.
I didn't know non-puritanism scales with size! TIL!
> Pretty much everything you listed is a norm
Yes, that's exactly what I wrote. Seems you agree after all!
So, if I am just cherrypicking, where is the majority of states with uncensored radio and music? Where do you see nipples on magazines in supermarkets? Where can you say "shit", "piss", "fuck", "cunt", "cocksucker", "motherfucker", and "tits" on TV and in movies without repercussion? In which states can you bathe nude or even just topless? Or just even change on the beach? Where can I consume alcohol in public as a norm, without brown bag? Where can I simply drink in a car, as long as I am not driving, or, as a driver, not exceeding the legal alcohol limit?
> many of whom might make a Roman at their peak blush.
To add onto this point, many states are larger than countries in Europe. Each state is in itself a country in all but name, given the difference in values, traditions and culture. You can travel all across the US and it's exactly like travelling across Europe given the diversity.
Uh, I'm an American who's been all over the country and my biggest complaint about travel in the US is that damn near the only diversity is the physical landscape and which regional fast food chains you see. We're extremely homogenous, with maybe a half-dozen somewhat-different (but not that different) regions. The rural/urban divide is by far our biggest one, not state-by-state or regional. Those differences are so tiny that rural/urban overwhelms them everywhere.
You can drive 500 miles in this country and feel like you haven't moved an inch.
I come from a small, conservative town, so about as American as you can get, and I just flat out don't believe you. Homogeneity in the US is a myth - simply crossing a state border can find you in a whole new world of laws, customs and traditions. I talk to friends who have travelled all over the world, and when they mention to me their experiences with new cultures, I simply shake my head and say "But I can get that same experience here."
While the states have much more diversity than many Europeans I've met assume (especially things like regional cuisine, or local laws) nevertheless Europe does have more diversity. American as just more similar on average than Europeans from different countries.
The things that get me are blurred bums, logos, and paintings on the wall.
America is extremely polarised. On the one hand it's blurring bottoms and censoring words of drugs in songs and the other it produces the most hard core porn and gun violence...
I once read an article that wrote about different cultures typical curse words. It explained that the principle of cursing is to break a taboo. If you know how a culture curses, you know what's holy to them.
* In North America, cursing often revolves around sexuality.
* In slavic countries, cursing involves the mother.
* In middle eastern countries, it involves the father. (Not sure if I remember that one correctly, though.)
Hollywood might not be downright puritanical, but compared to European TV they make a much bigger deal out of upper body nudity and swearing, among other topics. There are a couple of exceptions (HBO comes to mind), but as a general rule Hollywood definitely isn't running wild (except when it comes to violence).
And why is that? Because Americans are puritanical.
I don't think "puritanical" is the right word in this case. Unless you are implying that smoking being considered unhealthy is something based on Puritan or other religious values.
>> And why is that? Because Americans are puritanical.
> I don't think "puritanical" is the right word in this case. Unless you are implying that smoking being considered unhealthy is something based on Puritan or other religious values.
We Americans are puritanical, and that's in the sense of being able to imagine that our values are universal because they are good and correct, having been arrived at only after a great deal of thought and even spilled blood; and that anyone who disagrees is at best thoughtless or ignorant, but quite possibly crazy or evil.
Just because the taboo changed does not mean that the Puritan-inside(tm) hardware most Americans have is not there (self-evident on conservatives and very rabid omg-living-in-denial in liberals)
The main point is, in Puritanism, thinking the wrong thing is a sin, so even writing it down is seen as bad. Other cultures can discuss without dirtying their souls/minds/egos.
The main point is, in Puritanism, thinking the wrong thing is a sin, so even writing it down is seen as bad. Other cultures can discuss without dirtying their souls/minds/egos.
The issue isn't that "writing it down is bad" its that certain descriptions of a character are going to cause readers to judge that character differently depending on the culture the reader is used to. People who think smoking around children is a bad thing, are going to judge a parent doing that around their children. So, an editor might believe that removing that reference will avoid people focusing on an unimportant detail in a way that negatively affects the story being told.
Surely you know how ridiculous that comparison is. Second hand smoke kills, second hand food does not. You need to eat to be healthy, you do not need to smoke to be healthy. Not eating in front of children is more likely to give them dietary issues than not.
In the Japanese translation of Inside Out, the animation was changed to replace broccoli with green peppers. This is obviously not a literal translation. However, the change serves the point of the scene. The point of the scene is to introduce the character Disgust. In Japan, the cultural norm is that kids hate green peppers, so changing the vegetable makes it clearer that the newly introduced character is Disgust.
If the point of the passage was that this character is "a good parent", then getting that point across to American audiences would depend on cultural context. If the point is to describe without judgement, then a more literal translation makes more sense.
It's not unheard of to drink with lunch in the US, but it isn't common in most subcultures. The whole concept of "happy hour" involves immediately after work being the accepted time for daily drinkers to start. Americans on the whole drink rather less, and have more teetotalers.
The easier thing to do is edit the beer out or replace it with coffee or soda, because the message the mid-day beer sends is in fact a parent who drinks too much in front of the kids.
An American with no experience of European culture might be startled that everyone drinks at lunchtime, but wouldn't consider a European, or American, who has a beer with lunch, to be degenerate or alcoholic. A round of drinks during a business lunch is commonplace, some places it's a Friday thing. What it isn't is totally unremarkable.
So as the exception rather than the norm, including this detail in a fictional context does send a different message. The editor is probably right to cut that line in translation.
> "The editor is probably right to cut that line in translation."
I can't agree with that. As a non-European, if I'm buying a translated work from a European author about a European character, I expect them to behave as ordinary Europeans would. I am paying for the authentic foreignness.
If I wanted to see people behaving as they would in my own culture, I'd buy a work from a domestic author.
Surprised I had to scroll this far to find this point. The ramifications of censorship stretch beyond interpretation of the book itself. Cultural norms are partially established by media, so by censoring this one is in fact reinforcing the puritanical norms.
But is it not common knowledge for a target audience of Americans reading translations of Italian novels that Italians on average are far more relaxed in this matter? And if not, would it not be a good opportunity to teach them something here?
>"happy hour" involves immediately after work being the accepted time for daily drinkers to start
"happy hour" is the commercial offering of alcoholic drinks at a cheaper price to entice customers to come early. That will create a convivial atmosphere enticing more customers, and once there people will frequently have "just one more" a few times, extending their evening. Pretty sure it's about selling rather than social mores.
Imagine if instead, a scene mentioned a child coming home and talking to his father who was in the middle of disassembling and cleaning his gun at the kitchen table. For many Americans this would be completely normal, but many Euros would think that was "bad parenting". As others have said, it seems like the editor was suggesting that Americans may view the scene differently than the writer may have intended, and was pointing out the fact to the author so they would be aware.
Also it's hard to know without further context, but if the Euro was writing a story that would be set in America, that scene would seen somewhat odd to most Americans as mid-day drinking is not all that common, especially mid-week or without an explicit reason, like a birthday or some sort of celebration.
> A lot of people in Europe drink a beer or glass of wine when having lunch. It's completely normal.
When you live in a culture where a midday drink or drinking in front of children is associated with drinking problems, soon enough you will live in a culture where only people with drinking problems will be having a midday drink or drink in front of their children.
When people say "don't drink and drive", they don't mean it's dangerous to have like one beer and then wait two hours. "Drinking" generally implies getting drunk, basically.
And what if it’s a midday cigarette? Both have moderation and addiction. Perhaps the image of a loving grandpa smoking a tobacco pipe would alleviate the stigma.
Perhaps this detail should stay in to show a difference between (some) American and (some) European sensibilities?
There's a question of how familiar or unfamiliar a story should seem when it's set in a time and place that's different from what the reader is familiar with. Do you emphasize the differences or hide them? Maybe you add a footnote? But this assumes the reader needs a footnote. It's a way of highlighting the distance between the reader and the story setting.
Cultural changes are like that.
As someone who reads in part to find out about cultural differences, I think that maybe stories shouldn't seem too familiar, and I like footnotes and asides. Perhaps others will think them distracting, though.
No the point is that Americans will think you're moralizing even when you don't intend to moralize. It's like portraying a character kicking a puppy, when the author comes from a culture where kicking puppies is just normal everyday behavior.
Americans can handle complicated stories with ambiguity and no clear good v evil.
But there are loud camps of culture warriors who raise a fuss if it's not "safe for kids" and a whole industry of grifters who amplify this, because getting people angry improves their TV ratings and the political campaign funds.
There are a lot of managers in the arts and culture industry (editors, producers, museum directors etc) who are rarely rewarded but often punished for resisting the culture warriors.
Hard disagree. One of my earliest memories is my parents having breakfast that consisted of coffee and a cloud of smoke. If by puritanical we understand the mores inherited by Americans from Puritans then this absolutely qualifies.
Unless the goal is to make the sentence palatable to Americans only, it could be understood as editing to make sure the author's point is preserved, but otherwise it is merely hiding what some believe life "should" look like.
And even if it's "bad parenting" why can't someone write a scene where this casual bad behaviour happens in the background, without having to explicitly point it out as bad?
With what we've known about 2nd hand smoke for decades now, I think we can universally say smoking in front of your kids is bad parenting. So it's a really interesting example, what it says about the author that they don't think they are portraying bad parenting.
And is it just an American thing? I haven't noticed that English, Irish, or Scottish people smoke all that much. But visiting Germany and seeing the blase attitude towards public smoking was definitely a culture shock.
My unconscious judgement is that the smoker is someone who does this all the time (which might not be true) and the fireplace-user is just lighting a fireplace as a special occasion (also not necessarily true). So if I see a scene of a parent smoking, I will judge them as a bad parent, but not really the fireplace user.
To answer your actual question, yes, doing something that is worse than smoking near your kids is bad parenting (unless it's a rare enough event to cause negligible harm).
I looked around for studies concluding that wood smoke from indoor fireplaces had worse health effects than chronic secondhand smoke exposure. I found a few that link wood smoke and lung cancer, which makes sense to me because wood smoke is a carcinogen. But I didn't find anything claiming it was worse than secondhand cigarette smoke, which is the part of the claim I find unintuitive. Can you point me to whatever source you used to make the above statement?
Do those studies link "wood smoke from indoor fireplaces" or just "wood smoke" to lung cancer? The level of smoke exposure from a modern indoor fireplace is considerably less than from an outdoor fire pit.
I will happily have my fireplace burning all day long on a subzero winter day, throwing on the occasional fresh log. But if I have a bonfire outside in summer, I need to be standing upwind.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3002194/ is the one I was mainly thinking of. This is about indoor solid fuel burning. They looked at coal and wood, and found very strong effects in coal (duh) but also some effects in wood. But, I didn't see any comparison to cigarettes or secondhand smoke from either of them.
It would be really surprising to me if it were the case, because secondhand smoke certainly seems like it creates more particulates in a house, since most wood smoke goes up the chimney. Plus, if you smoke, you're probably not only smoking for part of the year, like with fireplace use.
But, my intuition is not a strong argument, so that's why I'd love to see the study.
I'm confused. That's... not how fireplaces work. The exhaust goes up the chimney, not into the room. The heat in the room is radiant heat from the bricks in the chimney.
Also, how is one other (potentially bad or not) activity germain to the one being discussed? What about clowns? What about how Swedish fish candies are made?
> The exhaust goes up the chimney, not into the room.
Most of it, yes, but there's still a very large increase in particles in the air, far more than when smoking.
> how is one other (potentially bad or not) activity germain to the one being discussed?
My parent was saying "given the health effects, you should not smoke in front of your children". I was asking how they squared this with an activity with much larger health effects that I suspect they think is fine to do with your kids.
Particulate count is the least of your worries when it comes to cigarette smoke. The tar, acetone, cadmium, carbon monoxide, etc etc etc is going to do a lot more damage.
Do you have any evidence that indoor wood fires are more damaging that cigarette smoke?
The funny thing is that Germany and the USA have about the same smoking rate (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/smoking-r...) but in the USA, it is culturally prohibited in almost every single state or city to smoke around children, in restaurants, in hotels, near primary entrances, or on sidewalks because people feel ashamed for doing it (and in many cases are punished criminally for smoking in those places). So yeah, the attitude is very, very different. Over here, smokers know it is bad for them and do it anyways. In Germany and Austria, many people consider it their way of life and that it isn't actually bad for them.
Just this summer I spent a few weeks in three European cities.
Europe gets extra points for all the outdoor seating, but loses all of them because it's impossible to sit outside and enjoy a coffee or a meal without someone lighting up a cigarette next to them.
I do wish Europe would discover non-smoking rules near food & drink.
> The funny thing is that Germany and the USA have about the same smoking rate (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/smoking-r...) but in the USA, it is culturally prohibited in almost every single state or city to smoke around children, in restaurants, in hotels, near primary entrances, or on sidewalks because people feel ashamed for doing it (and in many cases are punished criminally for smoking in those places). So yeah, the attitude is very, very different. Over here, smokers know it is bad for them and do it anyways. In Germany and Austria, many people consider it their way of life and that it isn't actually bad for them.
That's very interesting. I'd love to see the comparison between the stats on smoking related diseases in those places that prohibit public smoking and those that do not, given that both places have a similar number of smokers.
As an European (and an ex smoker, and a parent), I'd say smoking in front of your kids is definitely not a good idea (and smoking in general is bad), but wouldn't go so far to call it bad parenting.
My interpretation is that it is this thinking that the author is describing in their article. In short, if someone wasn't prudent, they would't feel to have to edit-out "not good" things. You could take them as just being a part of reality.
For the author, certain info (such as him very his usual briefs or she climaxing or someone smoking) is just to add "reality" to the scene. It doesn't say anything about the character per se. Yet, to Americans, it does. To them if it wouldn't say anything about the scene, it wouldn't be included. But that's only true for a subset of topics, them being body/sex stuff and smoking. Nobody would raise an eyebrow if the character was watching a football game.
> American readers need body/sex stuff to be told as stories and not as facts (so says my friend Sara Marzullo, about whom more later). The problem is that even if sex always requires storytelling, you can still just show a body—or a feeling, a glitch in the software of life where sex transpires—in a way that is not easy to interpret, or in a way that maybe doesn’t need to be interpreted at all, but that only needs to ring true. And even if this thing I just wrote sounds wholesome and real, somehow American literature—writers, editors, critics, readers—needs sex always to be contextualized. It should be raunchy. Or loving. Or a cautionary tale. It cannot be open-ended.
> This is a good chunk of what literature is for me. An opaqueness that affords us openendedness. Openendedness that is based on a feel for the world where details create facts so vivid you can touch them. They make you say « that’s real ». If stuff is put in a story only to create the sense of a story, then often it won’t coalesce into a simulacrum of reality.
I think we're also getting caught up in an implicit assumption that "bad parenting == bad parent", which is absolutely not the case. As a parent, I can tell you that every parent does "bad parenting" from time to time due to stress, tiredness, etc. but that doesn't make that parent a "bad parent", just a normal human being.
I think the point is that it doesn't matter. It's a scene showing regular people doing regular things. The things they do might be bad, good, or neither, and most good people almost certainly have bad traits (and vice versa). Showing all of those facets of a character doesn't have to be about making some moral point about their goodness or badness. It can just be about showing their humanity.
I’m from Poland and smoking in public here is everywhere. I go through the ritual of holding my breath countless times a day when I pass smokers, ever since I was a child. My visits to the UK agree with your picture of it. Fortunately I’m moving to the UK, so that aspect of life, among many others, is going to get better.
The question is why the editor feels the need to point it out, rather than letting the writer communicate the image to the reader and the reader form a private opinion about what the image signifies.
It's one thing for an editor to say 'this passage is confusing or boring,' quite another to add in personal opinions of fictional or historical characters.
> Yet when the editor showed me their notes, I felt bad, I felt I was wrong. I felt that mentioning my briefs was wrong. It was as if I were being called out for a misdemeanor. The editing was so subtle and penetrating, it sent me on a tailspin. How can I explain? In my version, I was in my underpants, and that specific shame was inherent to the portrayal. That shame was existential yet not political. Putting my underwear on the page was a way to show vulnerability, but without making it too clear a predicament, a way of adding the warmth, the sleaze, the camaraderie, the confusion. In their edit, though, it became something altogether different: my making ironic fun of my naked wife was now unfair—even unjust—as it was now coming from a presumably fully-clad person. And without the hint of our drunken blackouts, we now had no shared sadness and exhaustion, and also no affection and complicity.
This paragraph really hits home for me with respect to what people refer to as a "chilling effect" on expression post 2015. This American editor almost feels like a metaphor.
When juxtaposed with our values, it's clear how things got this way. Social media lets us casually evoke, and even moralize, these judgements. When cast en masse with hash tags, threads, and replies it looks like a very unsafe world for us to be ourselves. Suddenly, things look less free than they used to be.
A man must be poking idle, unpleasant fun at his barely dressed wife. A parent must be bad if there's beer or cigarettes observed, but not when hidden - that's a different kind of ill, right? All these little cliches add up to a larger story, and that's what I'm reading. Our tendency for clear villains and heroes leaks into everything we do - even to how we shape our literature.
Tangentially related to the topic but I find American cultural attitudes towards sex very bizarre from the outside looking in. The view America projects of itself to the world through media is that it's the land of "Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll" and Americans love having fun, but internally America feels culturally like a deeply prudish country, much more than in Europe and Asia.
For many americans, its hard to get actually drunk at the bar without having to drive home after. You might live well outside of walking distance and there might be really poor coverage of taxi or rideshare services. You might have to have someone be the designated driver. For some reason the standard price of a pint of beer that isn't bud light has creeped up to at least $10 practically everywhere, in the 'cheap' midwest too. It adds a ton of friction to these cultural things that are much more commonplace elsewhere that have a lot lower friction to engage with them.
For example, in southern europe, its pretty common to see people openly drinking on the streets and no one bats an eye, either beers or straight up taking pulls from vodka bottles as casually as if its a water bottle. A lot more people live walking distance to a bar or someplace that serves alcohol. The smallest village will have a bar before it has a pharmacy or any other services. I've even found it to be cheaper to order light beer than to order water in restaurants in certain countries (they don't give you water for free like in the U.S.). Getting drunk is a lot more convenient and cheaper in europe than it is in America, unless you live in a college town that has dirt cheap well drink deals or something like that, and those towns feel pretty european to me with their drinking culture as a result.
> they don't give you water for free like in the U.S.
Well, to be fair, what you typically get in Europe is a nice bottle of mineral water, while in the US they just give you tap water (which would be considered faux pas in Europe).
I mean I wouldn't say that's the image they project. their tv shows and films are shockingly prudish. push any violence you like, but heaven forbid you show a tit
they also have this thing where everything has to have a moral. even things that are seemingly immoral - it's always sunny, south park, etc - do in fact have a moral message. the message being "if you're doing the things our characters are doing, you're immoral"
Using sociopathic/immoral characters in situations where they should reflect, but dont (or take the "wrong" stance) is a trope that goes back to Seinfeld. They are not deliberately/exclusively trying to make a value judgement. Usually it's social/political commentary specifically designed to shed light on how awful Americans can be to each other. It's (subjectively) funny because we have encountered milder forms of such people in real life, perhaps.
I agree that we are prude as a culture, just dont see how this is evidenced by the average sitcom. South Park in particular is a very strange example of a "prude" show.
It's the underlying prudishness at various layers (some of it is only historical, some of it lives in the present to varying degrees in various sub-populations) which makes the rebellious "Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll" thing a thing at all. If there was no prudishness in the first place, there would be no space for it to be popular to revolt against it.
It's because American media exports are mostly produced by a small group of people in California, one of the more socially progressive parts of the country.
A significant portion of the country's 330 million people are indeed prudes.
There’s more nuance to it than that, however: consider how the standards of film ratings diverge from the people making films. “This film is not rated” dug into that at some length, and I think it’s worth considering how much that has skewed the entire public discourse. We’re missing out on a lot of great movies because everyone knows that you can get approval for violence much easier than a healthy relationship.
I’d also note the difference between the public moral image projected and what they practice in private. We have far more hypocrites than prudes.
That's definitely the stereotype and I wouldn't say it's wrong. There's both a puritanical streak and an out-of-controlness in US culture. Also, Americans are less comfortable with their bodies, sex or no: public nudity, greasy hair, uncorrected teeth, body odor are things American's find disturbing in Europe and perhaps other cultures.
That's because America is not uniform or homogenous. I live in the one state in the country where prostitution is legal, and one of the few where gambling (outside of tribal land) is legal - and yet, the state immediately to the east is the Mormon capital of the world.
In my experience Asia (I lived in Korea, so my experience is primarily indexed against that) is far more prudish than America when it comes to sex.
My question, is how did Europe develop its seeming openness to sex and nudity? 1950s and earlier Europe looked a lot like America, maybe in that time America even seemed more open with sex. Europe produced Victorian prudishness, it used to be the norm for women to cover their hair, etc. It's not like Europe was always seen as a place that has been really open with sexuality.
I'm trying to read through this piece but its difficult because I don't really buy the underlying premise that this is indicative of North American editors generally and even specifically I find it hard to imagine that it is this extraneous at all as often to comment about.
I tend to believe writers and their point of view on the editing process. I've been published in a small number of publications and I know the process. My biggest gripe is the cultural norm of not being able to pick or have veto power over the title, not editors that are completely inflexible and stacked with their own moral code which crushes over the prose.
At the end of the day this seems like there was no meeting of the minds between the editor and writer before they started working together, but I do not believe it is at all this prevalent anyway.
Yes, I'm a Christian too, like the derided editor, but I know the difference between literature and trashy erotica. While I appreciate the former and avoid the latter, I would never brow beat a writer as an editor over the choice of having parents smoke cigarettes in front of their kids and I simply wouldn't take up the task of editing work that was outside my moral boundaries. I like fiction that rings true. Reality includes all sorts of bad parenting.
There is a type of writing that is in vogue lately where preconceived biases get validated through a juicy narrative that is obviously unjust and thereby justifying the reader's pre-held notions. I hate it.
It's my one concern with the Substack / filter bubble way of doing things. A thousand avid fans can prop up work that is mostly meritless and divisive. Or they can prop up valuable work that the public generally ignores.
I feel like this was just a misunderstanding about the words that were removed instead of re-written. I thought “marriage blackout nights” was some cultural thing. Turns out the author was talking about the trend of a married couple who often got blackout drunk. But, I completely missed that meaning on my first read.
Agreed. My takeaway of the first passage was quite different than what the author had indented to express. The editor wasn't censoring the author, she was making cultural translations.
The author's obsession with the balcony passage is hilarious, and it gives me a good insight into his general attitude. It's as though he feels that his prowess is being questioned and that he needs to be defensive and attack an entire culture. I mean, in response to a minor edit, he literally called up a "friend" out of the blue to ask her details about sex they had a decade back. That's Grade A insecurity.
It's likely this insecurity is seeped thoughout his writing. And his editor is doing her best to legitimately improve his story telling.
The missing piece of this article is where his writing was going to end up. Was he writing for Readers Digest? The New Yorker? A trade paperback? I feel like the editorial process would be considerably different based on the who is publishing the work and the intended audience.
I must agree. The most important thing for a writer would be the audience: "For whom am I writing" It may be very well the case, what he was writing was not correct for the audience targeted by the editorial.
The generalisation "americans" is twofold wrong: first, I do not think that the whole US editorial market is exactly the same. Pretty sure there is place for pornographic writing. But second, especially coming from a writer, he should say "northamerican". May sound pedantic, but we are talking about people influential in cultural scene.
> I must agree. The most important thing for a writer would be the audience: "For whom am I writing" It may be very well the case, what he was writing was not correct for the audience targeted by the editorial.
Yeah but why is it "not correct" for the targeted audience? According to the author, prudishness.
The first example is the following magazine: https://www.nplusonemag.com/
“n+1 is a print and digital magazine of literature, culture, and politics published three times yearly
For me the most important point in this is nothing to do with sex. It's the fact that a generation of readers and editors are coming up who find the description of moral weakness without a counterbalancing punishment or redemption problematic - to borrow a term.
I’m always flabbergasted by the things US movies and TV shows choose to beep/cut. It feels like many “normal life” topics have been transformed into a taboo, even the very mention in public would be subject to stigma.
To me it's interesting that the Americans did not in fact edit sex out of any of the writings.
In the case of the wife in the bed, it seems like the American editor was trying to punch it up and bring into focus what they believed was more salient. Mistakenly maybe, but no sex was edited out.
In the case of the balcony scene, it's hard to guess what the editor was trying to accomplish. Maybe enhance the realism? It's a well known fact that most women do not orgasm via penetrative sex alone. But this is rarely shown in media, written or otherwise. I don't really see the need for the edit, or how the edit is characteristically American, because unrealistic depictions of female orgasm are by far the norm in American media. But perhaps the editor is trying to improve the situation?
Maybe the author means the Americans are making their writing less sex-y?
I'm guessing the pot smoking got edited out? But the clunker of a line is the bit about "both of us mysteriously unaffected by vertigo". Unless it was prior established that there should be vertigo, and vertigo is a useful metaphor for illustrating other elements of the overall story/something about the protagonist, that line contributes nothing and doesn't belong, especially followed by orgasm: an orgasm which included no vertigo? In tight writing, very phrase and clause of every sentence should serve a purpose toward the overall story, and hopefully frequently more than one.
It is always fascinating to me how different sex in literature, cinema, etc. is treated in the USA compared to Europe.
My favorite example is the movie "The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain" (which btw is awesome). It has an "FSK 6" rating in Germany, which means it is free to watch for children six years or older. In the US it is R rated, which means children unter 17 have to be accompanied by an adult to watch the movie. The reason for the R rating is that one of the characters, Nino, is working in a sex shop, and in one scene Amelie enters the shop and you can see Nino applying price stickers on adult toys, which in the US seems to be dangerous to the soul of teenagers, while Europeans would not even think about this for a moment.
I remember she was getting banged in one scene, which the narrator commented something like "sex - Amelia tried it, meh". Maybe the scene was cut entirely.
Duh, you are correct, there was a sex scene. Maybe the most harmless sex scene ever created in cinema history, but there was one and I forgot about it.
Wasn't there another scene where the proprietor of the coffee shop had an orgasm and was screaming? And also some sex talk I remember. R might have been too much but I don't think pg13 would be unreasonable.
The one with Amélie was certainly very harmless, the other ones were a bit more spicy. Yet this shows the difference in thinking between America and Europe.
I think both of these are wrong. For Germans violence seems to be a bigger issue than sex, while for Americans sex is a bigger taboo than violence.
Both of these are completely misguided (IMO) moral policing and disempowering of the population. Both say: people are not capable of making a sound moral choice on their own, they must be protected from seeing things that could negatively influence their character.
That being said, if I were to pick between these two bad policies, I personally think sex is a vastly less morally objectionable topic. On one hand you have an activity that (between consenting people) is pleasurable and is essential in propagating the species, while the other is generally undesirable to everyone involved.
> Both say: people are not capable of making a sound moral choice on their own, they must be protected from seeing things that could negatively influence their character.
Germany became strongly anti-violence after WWII cause the normalization of violence in that period and level of it was extraordinary high in Germany.
I don't dispute the cultural aspect, in fact that's a center point of my post. But Germany does have (to the best of my knowledge) a special rating board that even used to enforce censorship in games. E.g. games sold in Germany had to have blood removed.
Again, the cultural aspect is core to the entire thing, but nevertheless the overarching theme is that both countries apply a sort of self censorship.
America has ratings and similar censorship for games too. They also have strong cultural/economic taboos that work on top of it. They censor different things and different topics tho.
Every country has something that rates or censors entertainment for popular consumption. Some are overbearing or carry criminal offenses (Iran, Russia) and some are more off economic (store wont sell your game).
>It was easy to edit that orgasm out. The passage sounds better without the uselessly controversial bit, so the reader can concentrate on the experience the two characters are having.
In fact, the opoosite was gained: the american editor forced it to be a story without the fun - two, if not sinners, then desperate people, slamming their bodies onto one another. For all we know, they get nothing out of this. With the orgasm detail in, it becomes fun sex - and dirty.
Same way adulteresses had to be punished for it in Noir films, or they wouldn't pass the censorship.
A long, sometimes tedious, but subtle and interesting piece on the
relationship between the real world, of messy, complex adult humans,
and the plastic world we try to construct as we wish it to be.
In this case it's a novel writer and a prudish editor. I can relate to
this when editors tone down my attacks on unethical tech companies who
might be advertisers - generally though I get a free hand because most
editors seem sympathetic to the same concerns.
But it could equally be a magazine Photoshopping a model's blemishes,
or a company PR department putting a gloss on research work. Anyone who
has worked where an intermediary interprets ones work to an audience
has experienced this doctoring at some point.
The role of the sanitiser, filter, censor and arbiter of taste is ever
present. We seem to live in age of form over substance, appearance
above reality, and wishing into existence a world that won't offend
imaginary others.
Surely "my wife came" is the bit they should have cut!
More seriously, and boringly: I would have corrected "my wife came in the room" into "my wife came into the room". The former sounds like bad English to me.
>There were mornings following marriage blackout nights
Maybe it's just me but I don't understand what this sentence means. I've never heard of a "marriage blackout night" and can't parse what it means.
The second cut was taking "the usual briefs and t-shirt" out of this sentence:
>The other day I was sitting on my bed, the usual briefs and t-shirt, camera on the lines of my face and the new grey of my beard, when my wife came in the room as she was taking off the t-shirt she’d slept in
"the usual briefs and t-shirt" is not a sexual statement.
From what I can tell they've taken edits meant to improve the flow of the paragraph and, for reasons I can't see, taken them as editing sex out.