Hi Alphas,
Welcome to Alphaday 2, Season XVIII. It looks like we’re slipping into our familiar routine with amazing ease even at this early stage, well before our scheduled activities have reached their full volume. We’re building up to it with everybody contributing to our shared enjoyment of writerly matters.
Today’s agenda adds several essential parts to the overall picture as follows:
Alphaday 2 agenda:
- This bulletin from me
- The collated entries for the internal monologue challenge, ready for you to read and provide feedback, from Maria
- The brief for Challenge 2 from Phil
- The Log with your writerly news from Phil
- A Writers’ Reads prompt to discuss an aspect of your reading habits from Christine. The novelty here is that this will take place on the Discussion Board. More about this later!
That should keep you occupied for a while. Next Alphaday the agenda will be up to full capacity and hopefully you’ll all find it so inspiring that you’ll participate with gusto in everything we propose and give us your personal take on the matters in hand.
General news:
How are you getting on with woke culture or cancel culture? I was somewhat perturbed when I came across the following news item about Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’:
‘It is claimed that scenes such as Prospero arriving at the play’s island setting and suppressing its inhabitants, and the spirit Ariel and the monstrous Caliban, have “violent colonial implications”.’
It was suggested that the play needed to be adjusted to avoid such connotations.
It is true, of course, that Prospero was a manipulative, Machiavellian tyrant who invaded an island and enslaved its native inhabitants; in other words, the worst type of villain in the cancel culture’s books. Perhaps it doesn’t matter that Prospero at the end got rid of his powers. He broke his staff and drowned his magic book “deeper than did ever plummet sound.” He then let the younger generation, Miranda and Ferdinand, proceed to their “brave new world”.
It wouldn’t be the first time a Shakespeare play was deemed unfit for a sensitive public either. The Victorians famously gave King Lear a happy ending with Lear and Cordelia living happily ever after.
Censorship is a tricky issue these days when social media can blast children and other vulnerable persons with filth. That’s one aspect of the problem. But to superimpose a modern day sensitivity on the classics is a different matter. When ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ was declared not guilty of obscenity in 1960, this seemed like a major victory for art. “It’s art, not smut” they proclaimed.
A few years later Mary Whitehouse started her ‘Clean up TV Campaign’, methodically scanning every programme for smut – not interested in art. She might be applauding the present cancel culture from her grave. The smut they’re looking for now is not exactly Mary Whitehouse’s bugbears of blasphemy, sex, violence and war, but the search for offenders is as bloodthirsty as ever.
So how do we writers react? Do we join the vigilantes and hunt out offenders? Do we carefully avoid controversial themes and language? Or do we write as we please and not worry about being caught putting our foot in it? As Shakespeare did.
Christine