![davidquigg:
distorte:
barretta:
thisrecording:
the macabre unpleasantness of roald dahl
In which Alex Carnevale, editor of This Recording, takes every opportunity to pile vicious opprobrium at the feet of Roald Dahl. There were many unpleasant things about Dahl: he was an anti-Semite, and arguably misogynistic; this article, however, if article is what you wish to call it, is not journalism but mudslinging. I’m going to be frank, I’ve never seen much appeal in James and the Giant Peach, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but criticisms mount and mount upon one another in this piece. I’m not even sure what to call it. Carnevale simply lists one thing after another that he hates about Dahl, including:
“From a very young age Dahl found himself attracted to older women…” Ah, so your problem is he likes the cougars.
“By this time Dahl had placed his penis inside of too many people…” Oh, wait, it’s because he’s promiscuous.
“His friends were mostly communists [sic] and they were under scrutiny from Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against enemies of the state.” Wow. Just wow.
“His least anti-Semitic book, Peach features a young James Trotter bullied by sinister aunts. He leaves them for a fantasy world where he is advised by a grotesque grasshopper and other insects eager to sacrifice themselves for their new leader.” Really? I mean… really?
“A novel about a pedophilic monster who abducts a young girl and forces her to stare at the phalluses of larger giants, The BFG (essentially, The Big Fucking Giant) was just crazy enough to work.” This is how Carnevale labels the Big Friendly Giant. The actual origin of the acronym is never mentioned in the “article.” It remains only to be said that if this book contains pedophilic or phallic imagery that is not the product of Carnevale’s hysterical imaginings, I am an elephant.
I wasn’t too fond of Carnevale’s style before; stuff from This Recording tends to drift around Tumblr, and the rest of it’s really all right. But this sort of badly edited, slapdash list of Dahl’s crimes, seemingly written only to horrify readers of his generally harmless, if occasionally mature, stories, is by no account either good journalism or good writing. I salute you, Alex Carnevale; this is the worst web content I’ve seen in the last week.
(Made an edit to this post; I realized that the only articles from This Recording I’ve ever thought were tacky were Carnevale’s. I won’t tar the whole publication with one brush.)
I was going to write something about this scatter-shot bullshit by Carnevale but it was too exhausting. Glad someone stepped into the breach.
==========================
I posted this comment on Alex Carnevale’s original post …
From this article: “There has always been something extremely disturbing about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, from the poverty-stricken house where the Buckets sleep together in one bed like animals, to the gruesome deaths and mutilations suffered by the winners of the contest.”
From Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: “The bed was given to the four old grandparents because they were so old and tired. … Mr. and Mrs. Bucket and little Charlie Bucket slept together in the other room, upon mattresses on the floor.”
So, yes, exactly like animals, who notoriously sleep in beds and go out of their way to reserve the best for the weakest and oldest in the herd.
As for “the gruesome deaths,” please tell us who is dead in the chapter titled “The Other Children Go Home.” Five kids go in. Five kids leave. With lifetime supplies of candy. Violet leaves purple. Augustus leaves thin. Veruca leaves covered in trash. Mike leaves “ten feet tall and thin as a wire,” causing Charlie, who is literally labeled as the book’s “hero” right at the beginning, to cry “But how dreadful for him!”
My memory clashed with what you wrote. So I grabbed the book and checked. My memory clashes with what you wrote about the BFG. I’m going to skip the goose chase of finding evidence for a “pedophilic monster who abducts a young girl and forces her to stare at the phalluses of larger giants.”
Please do us the favor of quoting something so we don’t just have to take these assertions on faith.
Also, please take the time to walk us through the seeming incompatibility between “extremely sympathetic to Hitler, Mussolini, and the entire Nazi cause ” and “His friends were mostly communists.”
After reading this, I’m less interested in the ways Dahl’s personal grotesqueries supposedly polluted his books for kids and more interested in how an alleged Hitler-lover came to make heroes out of precisely the sort of weaklings, subversives and even shoplifters who would be exterminated on the way to creating any “master race.”
- David Quigg, 6/11/2011
Just to be clear, Alex has deleted most of the comments on the original article that highlight its weaknesses, and he has deleted pretty much all of the comments that go further and actually rebut some of his claims. So not only is the article shoddy to the point of being slanderous, any evidence of its readers being able to think for themselves has been given a thorough scrubbing.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lm48w4LsZ41qz88jjo1_1280.jpg)
In which Alex Carnevale, editor of This Recording, takes every opportunity to pile vicious opprobrium at the feet of Roald Dahl. There were many unpleasant things about Dahl: he was an anti-Semite, and arguably misogynistic; this article, however, if article is what you wish to call it, is not journalism but mudslinging. I’m going to be frank, I’ve never seen much appeal in James and the Giant Peach, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but criticisms mount and mount upon one another in this piece. I’m not even sure what to call it. Carnevale simply lists one thing after another that he hates about Dahl, including:
- “From a very young age Dahl found himself attracted to older women…” Ah, so your problem is he likes the cougars.
- “By this time Dahl had placed his penis inside of too many people…” Oh, wait, it’s because he’s promiscuous.
- “His friends were mostly communists [sic] and they were under scrutiny from Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against enemies of the state.” Wow. Just wow.
- “His least anti-Semitic book, Peach features a young James Trotter bullied by sinister aunts. He leaves them for a fantasy world where he is advised by a grotesque grasshopper and other insects eager to sacrifice themselves for their new leader.” Really? I mean… really?
- “A novel about a pedophilic monster who abducts a young girl and forces her to stare at the phalluses of larger giants, The BFG (essentially, The Big Fucking Giant) was just crazy enough to work.” This is how Carnevale labels the Big Friendly Giant. The actual origin of the acronym is never mentioned in the “article.” It remains only to be said that if this book contains pedophilic or phallic imagery that is not the product of Carnevale’s hysterical imaginings, I am an elephant.
I wasn’t too fond of Carnevale’s style before; stuff from This Recording tends to drift around Tumblr, and the rest of it’s really all right. But this sort of badly edited, slapdash list of Dahl’s crimes, seemingly written only to horrify readers of his generally harmless, if occasionally mature, stories, is by no account either good journalism or good writing. I salute you, Alex Carnevale; this is the worst web content I’ve seen in the last week.
(Made an edit to this post; I realized that the only articles from This Recording I’ve ever thought were tacky were Carnevale’s. I won’t tar the whole publication with one brush.)
I was going to write something about this scatter-shot bullshit by Carnevale but it was too exhausting. Glad someone stepped into the breach.
==========================
I posted this comment on Alex Carnevale’s original post …
From this article: “There has always been something extremely disturbing about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, from the poverty-stricken house where the Buckets sleep together in one bed like animals, to the gruesome deaths and mutilations suffered by the winners of the contest.”
From Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: “The bed was given to the four old grandparents because they were so old and tired. … Mr. and Mrs. Bucket and little Charlie Bucket slept together in the other room, upon mattresses on the floor.”
So, yes, exactly like animals, who notoriously sleep in beds and go out of their way to reserve the best for the weakest and oldest in the herd.
As for “the gruesome deaths,” please tell us who is dead in the chapter titled “The Other Children Go Home.” Five kids go in. Five kids leave. With lifetime supplies of candy. Violet leaves purple. Augustus leaves thin. Veruca leaves covered in trash. Mike leaves “ten feet tall and thin as a wire,” causing Charlie, who is literally labeled as the book’s “hero” right at the beginning, to cry “But how dreadful for him!”
My memory clashed with what you wrote. So I grabbed the book and checked. My memory clashes with what you wrote about the BFG. I’m going to skip the goose chase of finding evidence for a “pedophilic monster who abducts a young girl and forces her to stare at the phalluses of larger giants.”
Please do us the favor of quoting something so we don’t just have to take these assertions on faith.
Also, please take the time to walk us through the seeming incompatibility between “extremely sympathetic to Hitler, Mussolini, and the entire Nazi cause ” and “His friends were mostly communists.”
After reading this, I’m less interested in the ways Dahl’s personal grotesqueries supposedly polluted his books for kids and more interested in how an alleged Hitler-lover came to make heroes out of precisely the sort of weaklings, subversives and even shoplifters who would be exterminated on the way to creating any “master race.”
- David Quigg, 6/11/2011
Just to be clear, Alex has deleted most of the comments on the original article that highlight its weaknesses, and he has deleted pretty much all of the comments that go further and actually rebut some of his claims. So not only is the article shoddy to the point of being slanderous, any evidence of its readers being able to think for themselves has been given a thorough scrubbing.
