CENSORED!?! Part 1--Out of Order

This is a re-post of the original post that FB censored for the offending cover image on the chapbook of poems, Chance & Choice, Release date, March 3, 2017. If interested, please pre-order now @ https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/chance-choice-by-alice-bolstridge/ Thank you.

Monday, December 12, 2016

THE GREAT FLIPPED BLIP ~ on Art, Religion, & Politics

Probably like you, I get Facebook posts from Christian friends denouncing on Christian grounds the values and policies promoted by our president elect about all the most controversial issues of our time: the environment, taxes, jobs and the economy, interpretations of the 1st and 2nd amendments of the constitution, health care quality and accessibility, welfare, women's reproductive rights, voting rights, workers rights, and many more. And I get posts from other Christian friends defending and promoting on Christian grounds the very same values and policies promoted by our president elect and reflected in his cabinet picks.

My son, Moonway in the book Oppression for the Heaven of It, was preoccupied in  his art with paradoxes and tensions inherent in his Christian faith: responsibility for evil and suffering; the relationship between Christ and Satan; angels and demons; Adam, Eve, and the serpent. A youthful convert, he painted the suffering Christ with blood pouring from his heart. 

He painted Christ wearing the crown of thorns, a halo beaming out of the back of his head. He painted repeated images of Christ with one side of his face in light, the other in shadow and often broken. He painted a disembodied head of Christ with blank white disks where eyes should have been, head bent downward toward 3 diminutive crosses on a diminutive hill. He drew impressionist Christs, cubist Christs, charcoal Christs, ghostly Christs. He drew Christ surrounded by demons in cages.  He drew many demons, many of them labeled "Dragons of Madness." He drew Adam and a snake-like Eve dancing with the serpent; this one became a cover on a forthcoming chapbook of poems.

He painted lovely serpent couples rising out of water, posed as if dancing in a courtship ritual:

He said William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven & Hell was his favorite art work and, "There can be no peace on earth until Christ and Satan reconcile." Once in a letter, he wrote me, "Take the best they gave you in love and support, and leave the rest to the devil to carry away into hell or wherever he does the dirty work of God who I often call the Great Flipped Blip."

Moonway was never really comfortable in his Christianity. He loved the passion and fellowship he found in his early years in the church, but he yearned for resolution and reconciliation of the contradictions. He also yearned for the certainty he thought he saw in other Christians. Not finding it, he sought his own theology that grew increasingly strange to other parishioners, and he eventually drifted away from the church and turned increasingly to art, drawing and painting his discomfort in symbolic images by which his schizophrenic mind tried to make sense of a real world striven with the same kinds of paradoxes, contradictions, and conflicts of his faith.

I remember presidents back to the time of Franklin Roosevelt. I remember  partisan conflicts of the MCarthy era during Eisenhower's time. I remember the Kennedy and Johnson sixties with revolutionary activity for social justice. I remember Nixon's Watergate. I remember all the international conflicts of those times.  Watching the PBS series From Jesus to Christ, I remember that Christianity itself proceeded throughout its history riddled by and feeding into the same kind of conflict and division we see in our political life today.

For how to live with others, I take Jesus to be an important moral guide in the world and in my life but I am not a believer in Christianity. Moonway often said to me about his hallucinations, Mom, I wish you would believe this is real. I think he was a Christian believer like he believed in the reality of everything he saw in his mind and art. But he never asked me to believe in his faith. We talked often and peacefully about how to practice what Christ taught: Feed the hungry. Shelter the homeless. Love your neighbor, and your enemy.

CENSORED!?! Part 2

Eating fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil,

"They chewed and licked

until their whole bodies were drenched

in the juices, until the sweetness coursed

through their blood, until it pierced the DNA."

(Lines from CHANCE & CHOICE)

~To see details of the censored book, type CHANCE & CHOICE in the SEARCH bar @ https://www.finishinglinepress.com. Or click here for a direct link to the author page where you can place an order. Release date is March 3, 2017. If interested in buying, please pre-order now and help meet goals for advance sales which ends January 13 and will determine press run.~ 

The cover artwork of the book depicts Adam and Eve in "sexually suggestive actions" according to Facebook's criteria for buying a boost (ad).  

Facebook's response to my appeal of the boost rejection:

Thanks for writing in.

Your ad was disapproved because the image being used in the ad implies sexually-suggestive actions (ex: bending over sexually, sexually-suggestive focus on certain body parts, caressing body parts with tongue, lips, or mouth). Ads with a sexual undertone are not allowed. This applies even if your underlying product is represented by the image (ex: lingerie, condoms, sexual health books).

The current post remains published, but isn't running as an ad. If you'd like to boost your post, you'll have to recreate it with a policy-compliant image and boost it again.

Was this helpful? Let us know

Have a great day.

My response to Facebook:

The response does not explain why a post I boosted just last week with the very same image was accepted. The response does not clarify which details of the offending image fit the criteria you list. . . . Is it Adam's hand on Eve's breast? But I do not dispute that the image is sexually suggestive. I am arguing that your criteria is too restrictive to meet the standards stated in a supreme court decision defining "obscenity" as having no "redeeming social value." Your response does not at all address the concern about the Adam & Eve story itself being always interpreted as sexually suggestive and associating sexuality with evil. The image points to that association.  I believe that association should be made explicit and questioned in terms of redeeming social value.  Looking at that standard and in the context of the whole post, I believe any reasonable person would find the image to have redeeming social value. Please provide a higher level of judgement at Facebook that I can appeal to.  Hopefully a real human being that can respond to the specific image in the specific context of the whole post.

This morning I watched UNSLUT on PBS: Bonnie Erbe, TO THE CONTRARY.  I feel like I have been slut shamed by Facebook. It's surely neither intentional, nor personal. All the more reason to resist it, intentionally. Slut shaming has been going on likely since long before the story of Adam and Eve was even written, but the written story, codified in the Bible, made slut shaming such an intrinsic part of our cultural heritage we do it without even being aware of intending it.  We need to become aware.  We need to question our automatic association of Eve's/woman's sexuality with evil and with the knowledge of good and evil. 

CENSORED!?!

I never consciously thought that a literary work of mine might be censored even though I sometimes feel self conscious about what I might be unintentionally revealing about myself in the content of my writing, and even though I often have to struggle to resist censoring myself, and even though every rejection from a publisher might be considered a kind of censorship--figuratively if not legally.

So when I got a message from Facebook saying that my $20.00 boost was rejected for "sexually suggestive" content, I was shocked.   It was first accepted and $5.14 was already spent on early boosting. Another post I had boosted just the week before was accepted and completed, and it contained the very same image that was deemed to be "sexually suggestive" in the rejection. Click here to read the post with the "sexually suggestive" mage. By now, thanks in part to the first accepted boost, that image has reached more than 1000 viewers according to Facebook Insights. The art work was approved by the publisher for the cover of a forthcoming chapbook of poems. To see details of that book click Chance & Choice at Finishing Line Press or my Facebook Author Page.

The art work in question is an image of Adam and Eve with the Serpent. I would post it here,  but I want to boost this post. By the criteria used by Facebook for censoring, the Book of Genesis and other books of The Bible should be censored as well as innumerable interpretations of the Adam and Eve story and other works found in public museums and galleries.  If a respected museum wanted to use such an image to advertise, would Facebook reject it? Maybe so because it is likely an algorithm, not a discerning human being, that decides. But is it right?

Once over the initial shock, I went into defensive mode. I got on some of the writers groups I have joined, posted a summary of the situation with the image, and asked for comments and suggestions. So far I have only gotten 3 responses. Only one was encouraging: "Ask for a bump to another level of JUDGEMENT. By NO means at all should this be censored in my opinion." One said "This is fake news." I can't fathom what she meant by that. The 3rd said, "Can you change the picture for the ad and get on with it? Why waste energy on opinions, they always vary and run the spectrum." 

Relative to all the injustice in the world, my defense of this image must seem as trivial as the comment above suggests. Why should I fight this insult (only personal to me) when I have plenty to keep me busy in my fight for a clean environment, universal health care (including mental and social healthcare), universal income security, peace, etc. You can see many posts relating to these issues by clicking here. I could and maybe will remove the offending image and resubmit, but not before a fight. I have appealed. Facebook is not just any opinion; it is a very influential opinion. 

I have been looking for a  book about the interrelationship among Art, Religion, and Politics to teach  to a Senior Education class, and I think I have it in Blasphemy by S. Brent Plate which I just this morning found in a Google search and ordered. Hopefully, that book will give me a better handle on what I am getting into in adding one more cause to my social justice commitments: freedom of expression and of the press are values dear to my soul. Doesn't every writer feel that way? Apparently not. My shock is just another indication of my naivete about what it takes to be a professional writer.

This post will likely be continued when I receive the reply from my appeal.

THE GREAT FLIPPED BLIP ~ on Art, Religion, & Politics

Probably like you, I get Facebook posts from Christian friends denouncing on Christian grounds the values and policies promoted by our president elect about all the most controversial issues of our time: the environment, taxes, jobs and the economy, interpretations of the 1st and 2nd amendments of the constitution, health care quality and accessibility, welfare, women's reproductive rights, voting rights, workers rights, and many more. And I get posts from other Christian friends defending and promoting on Christian grounds the very same values and policies promoted by our president elect and reflected in his cabinet picks.

My son, Moonway in the book Oppression for the Heaven of It, was preoccupied in  his art with paradoxes and tensions inherent in his Christian faith: responsibility for evil and suffering; the relationship between Christ and Satan; angels and demons; Adam, Eve, and the serpent. A youthful convert, he painted the suffering Christ with blood pouring from his heart. He painted Christ wearing the crown of thorns, a halo beaming out of the back of his head. He painted repeated images of Christ with one side of his face in light, the other in shadow and often broken. He painted a disembodied head of Christ with blank white disks where eyes should have been, head bent downward toward 3 diminutive crosses on a diminutive hill. He drew impressionist Christs, cubist Christs, charcoal Christs, ghostly Christs. He drew Christ surrounded by demons in cages.  He drew many demons, many of them labeled "Dragons of Madness." He drew Adam and a snake-like Eve dancing with the serpent; this one became a cover on a forthcoming chapbook of poems.

He painted lovely serpent couples rising out of water, posed as if dancing in a courtship ritual:

He said William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven & Hell was his favorite art work and, "There can be no peace on earth until Christ and Satan reconcile." Once in a letter, he wrote me, "Take the best they gave you in love and support, and leave the rest to the devil to carry away into hell or wherever he does the dirty work of God who I often call the Great Flipped Blip."

Moonway was never really comfortable in his Christianity. He loved the passion and fellowship he found in his early years in the church, but he yearned for resolution and reconciliation of the contradictions. He also yearned for the certainty he thought he saw in other Christians. Not finding it, he sought his own theology that grew increasingly strange to other parishioners, and he eventually drifted away from the church and turned increasingly to art, drawing and painting his discomfort in symbolic images by which his schizophrenic mind tried to make sense of a real world striven with the same kinds of paradoxes, contradictions, and conflicts of his faith.

I remember presidents back to the time of Franklin Roosevelt. I remember  partisan conflicts of the MCarthy era during Eisenhower's time. I remember the Kennedy and Johnson sixties with revolutionary activity for social justice. I remember Nixon's Watergate. I remember all the international conflicts of those times.  Watching the PBS series From Jesus to Christ, I remember that Christianity itself proceeded throughout its history riddled by and feeding into the same kind of conflict and division we see in our political life today.

For how to live with others, I take Jesus to be an important moral guide in the world and in my life but I am not a believer in Christianity. Moonway often said to me about his hallucinations, Mom, I wish you would believe this is real. I think he was a Christian believer like he believed in the reality of everything he saw in his mind and art. But he never asked me to believe in his faith. We talked often and peacefully about how to practice what Christ taught: Feed the hungry. Shelter the homeless. Love your neighbor, and your enemy.

RISK, POSSIBILITIES, & PROBABILITIES

I am not much of a gambler, at least not with money. Except for a small investment in mutual funds and an occasional lottery ticket for a charitable cause, I don't gamble with my money.

As a writer, however, I gamble with my ego regularly by facing rejection every time I send out a submission to a magazine, writing contest, or book publisher. "Submission" is an interesting term to use for the act. We literally submit our precious product to an authority whom, most often, we do not even know, however much we research the publisher. Like most writers, I have faced such rejections hundreds of times. By now it may be in the thousands. I stopped counting many years ago. Probability, so far in my experience, always favors rejection with every individual submission. But bruises heal, and they are a small risk to take for the many rewards of exploration and discovery in the writing process itself and for the possibility of occasional publication or contest wins.

Such rejection is an especially small and personal risk compared to the risks we humans both individually and collectively take with social justice, our environment, our economy, and our politics where policies and decisions are so often made on the basis of perceived possibility of limited and temporary gains than on evidence-based probability. A headline in a local newspaper this week reads, "State geologist favors smart mining." It's not clear from the content of the article what is meant by "smart mining."  Smart for whom and for what?  It's possible that an open-pit mine at Bald Mountain could trigger an economic boom. It could create hundreds of good paying jobs as promoters of the mine promise. Those are certainly possibilities.

In all my research over the last several years, I have not found any reason to believe that an open-pit mineral mine at Bald Mountain can be smart for protecting the environment.  The evidence-based probabilities are that it will pollute the pristine waters of our area, likely require tax-payer maintenance in perpetuity to minimize damage, and destroy the sports industry, a major part of the local economy. Any posssible economic boom will end in an economic bust when the minerals are exhausted or the mining company goes bankrupt. In these situations, it is foolish to enact legislation on the basis of risky possibilities as the mining supporters are attempting to do.

In politics and the economy, risky possibilities for economic and political gain too often win, and probablities for harm are too often ignored.

Personally, though, I often need to take more risks on possibilities, make a choice, take a chance. Take a stand for justice against prevailing opinions and send in that Letter to the Editor. Write that story you always wanted to tell but were afraid it would be too revealing, and then submit the manuscript.

Here is a taste from the forthcoming chapbook, Chance and Choice:

Within minutes of his birth, his mother

had to choose.  Resuscitate or not?

Without it, he would die, mercifully

many said.  With it, tubes would invade him

again and again—through nose, mouth, veins

and arteries.  50% chance he might die anyway;

of those who live, more than 30% have some degree

of life-time handicap—blind, retarded, palsied.

90% have major complications.

The only certainties—quick death if no,

months-long suffering and disease if yes.

She didn’t hesitate—help him live.

Amid high-tech glare and urgency,

a tracheal tube cut off his cry.

March 3, 2017 is the release date for the book. Advance sales which end January 13 will determine the size of the press run. If you are interested, please place your order now at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/chance-choice-by-alice-bolstridge/ .

THANK YOU.

SELF PROMOTION & OTHER FORMS OF PRIDE

Promoting my own work is an emotional roller-coaster. Against my will, I despair at the frequent advice from the publisher about all that is needed to be an effective self promoter. I fear I can't possibly even make the goal for advance sales. I have a self conscious streak that shrinks from too much or too personal attention to me, afraid of being "found out" as a fraud, or, worse, as who I really am, etc. And I have a measure of agoraphobia. One time, I left a rally (for health care, I think) at the State Capitol Hall of Flags because people were packed in too close to me.  Such self consciousness (imagining that people are paying that much attention to me, negative or otherwise) is a form of narcissism.

And then I hear from friends congratulating me, I know it is all worth it for that high if nothing else. And I felt euphoric from the Friday night reading of poems from Chance & Choice at the second art show of my son's work. His drawing of Adam and Eve with the serpent is on the cover of the book. 

The event was packed, biggest audience, they said, they have ever had at this venue for a First Friday event. You can read and see more about it below. I am ashamed to admit I almost understand Trump's addiction to YUGE audience attention. One friend I shared this with ordered me not to compare myself with Trump. 

So here I sit still in the after-glow of warm attention I felt at the 1st Friday event, and the poems I read share some of the most personal experiences of my life, disclosing "who I really am." The relationship between reader and author, each solitary while under the spell of the reading or writing activity, is surely one of the most intimate experiences of our lives. More intimate than sex, this deepest sharing of one's mind. And it makes me anxious every time I prepare to read.

The publishing process for this little book seems to be distracting me from the fear and rage of the terrible 2016 election and the terrible state of our politics in general. Since the election, I have hardly read anything except advice about promoting my product. 

Even so, I am planning to participate in a rally,  the 3rd in 3 years, to protect our local area from the threat posed by another legislative attempt to weaken environmental protection rules and allow open-pit mineral mining of Bald Mountain, an extremely toxic site virtually certain to  pollute local waters with arsenic and sulphuric acid in perpetuity. In town hall meetings and elsewhere, our governor calls us "job killers," "one of the greatest enemies of the state of Maine," "zealots." I know, pride is one of the 7 deadly sins, and I confess it: I am proud to be a warrior in the fight for clean water, air, & soil; to be a combatant against the forces of greed and power lust driving the destruction of life on our planet.  It is as important to me as poetry. It feeds my motivation to write poetry.

March 3, 2017 is the release date for the book. Advance sales determine the size of the press run. If you are interested, you can place your order now at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/chance-choice-by-alice-bolstridge/ .

ART SHOW: RECEPTION AND READING

 

Very grateful to all the people who attended 

the reception and the poetry reading last night. 

Thanks so much to all of you and to hosts Brian & Jane: 

MORNING STAR ART & FRAMING is such an interesting place. 

All profits from sales will be donated to 

THE FOUNDATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN MENTAL HEALTH CARE

www.mentalhealthexcellence.org 

The art and the book, OPPRESSION FOR THE HEAVEN OF IT, 

will be up for bid or purchase until December 21.