No Porn, Or Even Nipples, On The iPad

Mags Blast iPad’s No-Nipples Policy

Apple’s no-nipples policy means fashion mags are censoring their iPad editions

I’m not sure what I think.

• I always appreciate somebody standing up for what they believe in.
• I hate censorship.
• I admit, I’ve got some anti-porn feelings. I do draw a line between depictions of sex in creative endeavors that require live humans and ones that don’t, i.e. in a book, painting, sculpture or even a realistic animation? Get graphic with your kinky self. In a movie,  internet video or photograph with actors/models doing these things for money? I get squiggy about that. From what I’ve read, I don’t like the way the porn industry treats its actors, particularly its women. Nobody’s looking out for them; I mean you don’t get voted into office as the politician who wants to “supervise porn.” But big business needs monitoring, and porn is huge business.  So, yeah, I tentatively appreciate somebody taking an anti-porn stand. (Note: I’m not talking about videos made by couples for sex therapy or sexual enhancement – people copulating on camera who would be doing it anyway doesn’t bother me, and though potentially titillating, those videos are not something I consider porn.)
• Just because something depicts body parts does not mean it’s porn, and America needs to lighten up about boobs (I gotta agree what the first writer says about breastfeeding).

It also gets into the question of if you develop a device, can you control the way it’s used? I’m tempted to say yes – it’s your invention – but if asked the same question about some practical items already in existence, I’d say no. Can Alexander Graham Bell set rules (yeah, from the grave) about what I can say on the telephone? Can the inventor of the television tell us what we can put on it? The inventor of digital cameras tell us what movies can be made? Does Al Gore get to decide what goes on the internet (just kidding!)?

The 20th and 21st century are all about communication – how we communicate, how quickly, from where to where – and it continues to raise some interesting questions about control.  True, a lot of communicators do not possess the same values I do, and that can lead to encountering things I would rather not see (and that I’d certainly rather my mythical children not see). On the other hand, a lot of controllers do not possess the same values I do, and as an artist, it terrifies me that they would stop me from communicating my ideas to the world. The fact that I know that the words I write would be censored in different places around the world for different reasons, in my mind, justifies my fear.

My verdict? And maybe this isn’t for the right reasons, but I’m OK with Steve Jobs outlawing porn aps on his iPad (and again, it’s not the sex. With the stories I write I have no business telling somebody else they can’t depict sex in their, uh, “artwork”). But I’m not OK with him censoring art/fashion photography in magazines. Maybe there’s a little inconsistency in that, but frankly, I’m still working out where, why, and how I draw my censorship line, because as much as we say “anything goes” on the internet, the reality is, I’ve never met anyone who still  meant that when you drag it down to the lowest depravities of human behavior (snuff? pedophilia? non-consensual sadism? is that really okay on the web?), and that means there is a line.

…and found this link which made my day in laughter. It’s  by travel writer Matt Gibson, and it’s on the dangers of picking a foreign language name when you don’t… quite… get the associated content of said name.

Though I must defend one of the names, Cash, as something that I have used for a character in a novel. But in my book, it’s the nickname of someone who’s real name is Cassius (a Latin name pronounced CASH-us (or CASS-ee-us in old, old Latin, but most people use the medieval Latin pronunciation now)), not a name in it’s own right. And if my name was Cassius, I might shorten it, too.

Otherwise… I’m finally at work on my epic fantasy of Heaven and Hell whose name I’m not telling the general public because I’m so dern excited about it. (I usually am lukewarm on my titles, but this one was so obvious and perfect… and I keep checking Amazon because I’m frankly shocked that it’s not already the title of a book.) Anywho, I was having a rough time because in the story there’s this initial brouhaha that happens… and then there’s a loooong time where stuff happens which is important, but the enormity of the stakes aren’t yet evident. And as any writer knows, stakes are key. But, thanks to my spate of fantasy reading, I’ve figured it out. Multiple plot threads. Der… I’ve been reading too many urban fantasies and romances where the plot necessarily centers on one or two people, and really, that’s not gonna work for this story. So now I have the plot line that’s going on in Heaven (the original one) and the plot line that’s going on in Hell (the new one that’s got very obvious stakes)… and eventually they are going to come together at the magical twisty moment in which the intensity of the stakes for all concerned get ratcheted up to epic.

I think I’d been worried that I wasn’t capable of balancing multiple plot lines (I almost wrote plot loins… I must be in RWA), but now that I’ve accepted the challenge, it’s really exciting and words are just flowing onto each new blank page. I’ve found that I need to work on one story and then open a new document and write another one, and then I’ll start putting them together. But I LOVE characters. I love their diversity and their strengths and weaknesses. I love bad guys with bits of good and good guys who fail. I love how viewpoint often determines who’s the hero and who’s the villain. And in a story about betrayal and forgiveness, having multiple viewpoints is exactly what I needed to add facets and shadings to questions of what is good and what is evil.

So… I’ve started on a blurb already, and here it is (and, OK, nobody reads my blog, so I’ll include the title):

The Judas Club is an epic fantasy of Heaven and Hell where angels, demons, the damned and the blessed struggle for identity and meaning after the worths of their souls have been judged – and the story of the Black Angels who straddle both worlds, braving Hell to offer the lost a second chance at salvation. (Here I need to figure out how to sum up in one or two sentences what the main characters’ GMCs (goal/motivation/conflicts) are (and there’re six of them – two Black Angels, a soul in Heaven, a soul in Hell, a demon and an angel). I’ll likely have to pick a couple and leave out the rest.) Until Jeshua of Bethlehem brings them all together to once again turn the establishment on its head – and dare the most dangerous rescue mission in the history of Heaven or Hell.

Wanna read it? I know I want to write it! It’s my fourth novel, and I’m drafting it now!!

Overall it was very sweet; no gloom or condemnation, but a bunch of happy people of diverse races, chipper messages of hope, and a call to read the Bible. I actually read most of it because it was nice.

Then I got to the section titled “Can One Rely on the Bible?” and its evidence was, well, completely inaccurate about what historians do and say. Now, I’m not trying to say that you can’t rely on the Bible. If that’s your religious text, there’s a lot of great stuff in there. I’ve read it multiple times and I feel enlightened by it. However, I get (I believe reasonably) frustrated when people try to pass off the book as literal truth using bad scholarship, especially as what the bulletin said sounded relatively reasonable, and if people didn’t realize it wasn’t accurate well, somebody could feel this bulletin had a good argument. The idea was basically that: “we can verify the Bible by comparing its manuscripts and translations. In fact, there are far more serious discrepancies among other works than among Bible manuscripts.” And it went on to compare the Bible to other historical works of dubious age and veracity, claim that historians took these other books as facts, and imply that academics were somehow prejudiced against the Bible because they won’t take it at face value.

Examples…

* The first comparison was to Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, which I read and studied in my Latin II class in college. The bulletin goes through the dates (“composed about 58-50 B.C…. oldest known manuscript dating to about A.D. 850… only ten manuscripts of the history are known.”) and then they get to the hugely misleading part, “Yet all scholars accept these as reliable history.” OK. In my Latin class when we read this, my teacher did say that this was Caesar’s personal account of a war he was actually in, so it’s about true events. He also said that Caesar wrote this to make himself look good and justify an expensive war, so don’t believe everything in it. It’s a piece of propaganda written by the winner, so take that into consideration when reading.

So if I take the Bible as literally as my scholarship has taught me to take Caesar’s Gallic War, I will see the Bible as a piece of propaganda written by the winners, and take its truth as such.

* Next comes the Roman History of Livy, which the paper claims “is accepted without question.” Well, that’s not really true, either. A historian will tell you that our current version of Ab Urbe Condita is based on a recension (a manuscript compiled by editors from current sources to make what they think is the truest version of the text – I would guess all texts from pre-Gutenberg days are going to be recensions) commissioned by Symmachus in 391 AD (the manuscript was composed between 27 and 25 BC). The book was popular enough that’s it’s probably reasonably accurate (more copies = easier to figure out what’s accurate because more texts state it that way)… but reasonably accurate still doesn’t mean that every word should not be set into stone as the direct word of Livy.

Second part regarding Livy… while there is reasonable acceptance of the text (again, NO historian takes a pre-print book’s text as 100% error free; and there’s even room for debate in post-print work)… the events described therein are not taken as being accurate. Livy was writing a history that started with Aeneas – a mythological hero who escaped from Troy as it burned (a war that historians aren’t even positive happened, much less know who was actually in it), and led a grand adventure in Carthage with Dido before landing in modern-day Italy and founding Rome.  And then there’s that OTHER version of the founding of Rome with Romulus and Remus, the fratricidal twins sired by Mars and raised by a she-wolf… but that’s a different version of  Roman “history”. Livy was writing about things that happened hundreds of years before he was born and relying on tradition for his “facts.” Because it was written in an old book, doesn’t mean it happened. Historians disregard as accurate ANY pieces of a text that include supernatural influence, and we always take into account the distance of the historian to the events that happened, his access to reliable resources, his potential biases… while the accuracy of the text to what the author has written can be documented, the historical accuracy of the events contained therein are always questioned.

So… if I treat the Bible like a treat Livy’s Roman History, I treat it as a text that is mostly intact from what the original authors wrote, but unreliable in its record of history, particularly the parts dealing with supernatural events.

* The bulletin goes on to compare the textual accuracy with Thucydides and Herodotus, two Greek historians considered the fathers of modern history for their use of primary sources, eye-witness accounts, and attempts to take the gods and other supernatural events out of history.  I won’t get into it, but basically the exact same things I said above apply here, no ancient text is 100% accurate and events (even from these two who tried very hard to do the research) are not accepted as 100% accurate (or, occasionally, even vaguely accurate).

* Finally it ends with a comparison to Shakespeare in saying that due to the comparative number of ancient copies in existence, we are assured of a “more accurate text for the New Testament, than there is of any text of Shakespeare.” I don’t even know how they justify this. Any Shakespeare scholar will tell you that there are 2+ versions of several of Shakespeare’s plays – the First Folio, and the original quarto (or, I believe some of them have several quartos, making multiple versions). The First Folio was the original compendium of Shakespeare’s plays, brought to a printer several years after Shakespeare’s death by his friends and colleagues at the King’s Men. They had texts for most of the plays, either previously published or rehearsal copies used in the theater, but it’s possible (even likely) that missing pieces were recalled by the actors who performed the roles and then written down for publication.

The problems with accuracy and Shakespeare are manifold and question, even, what is meant by an “accurate” text. Shakespeare wrote for the theater, and he didn’t necessarily think his plays would still be performed centuries later. Actors would occasionally rewrite lines, epilogues were frequently not composed by the playwright, Shakespeare would rewrite scenes for a revival (and which one is the “accurate” text then, the original or the one influenced by popular opinion?), people would write together and not necessarily note that, the whole idea of copyright wasn’t the same,  and anybody who’s even done a modicum of Shakespearean research knows that there are a jillion theories about Shakespeare’s authorship, from his plays were written by the (dead) Christopher Marlowe to they were written by a woman to Shakespeare wrote other plays that were accredited to somebody else to… It’s a hot mess.

And this is the accuracy in transcription of a popular author’s work by his friends and co-workers within ten years of his death when his works were still being performed and the printing press allowed multiple identical copies to be created at once. (We still have 228 of the supposed 1000 originally printed FFs!)

And nobody’s claiming ANYTHING Shakespeare wrote to be accurate history.

So… to sum up, anybody claiming the Bible is the literal word of God is making a leap of faith. And that’s cool – all religion eventually comes down to what an individual man (or woman!) can believe, and what what a man can’t believe. But to try to use history and science to prove that a document that old, (often) composed decades to centuries after the events it’s describing, written by people with a mission, compiled by people with a social and political agenda, and translated into your language is 100% accurate in text, meaning, and historical account? That doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Can I still find the text inspiring without it being 100% the literal word of God? Sure I can. Just as I can find inspiration in a variety of world religious texts and histories, none of which, from a scientific and historical perspective, can possibly be 100% accurate in text, meaning, and historical account. It does make hard to justify condemning somebody using an ancient text as “gospel truth” (or “Qur’an truth” or “Gita truth” or “Tao truth” or…) Heck, if you want “accurate” as a measure of religious validity, Hubbard’s Dianetics, Anton LeVey’s Satanic Bible, and Alistair Crowley’s Holy Books of Thelema are 100% accurate to author intention…  but I’m not recommending any of those as a way to live your life.

Faith can be a beautiful and powerful thing when used to strengthen character and help make the world a better place. I have no problem with that kind of faith, even if it isn’t justified by history or science. That’s what faith is, a “leap from the lion’s head” (to quote one of my favorite characters) into something greater than the five senses can touch and facts can justify, a leap that some people can’t make and that springs in a variety of directions for those who do choose to take it. I condemn no one for their belief or lack thereof because spirituality is a journey for which we are all equipped and trained differently – how could we all choose the same path? As long as people are using their faith (in divinity, science, or humanity) to bring joy, strength, peace, and frith into a world that can use a lot more of those, let’s celebrate the faithful for making that leap.

I’d heard that greeting card companies invented Valentine’s Day as a way to sell cards, and well, I didn’t believe it. So, as a budding romance novelist, I took it upon myself to look it up on ye olde trusty internet.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, there were three martyrs named Valentine, two of whom died in the 3rd century (maybe) and one of whom died in Africa at an unknown date. None of them seem to have anything to do with love. But that’s where we get the name from.

Though there are many debates as to why the mid-February date (some claiming it has to do with when one of those Valentines was buried), mid-February is also the date for the ancient Roman Lupercalia, a fertility festival that was celebrated on the Ides of February (Feb 15). This festival, according to…. somebody at the University of Chicago (there’s like 3 names on the site, and I’m not sure who actually wrote the article)… involved sacrificing goats and puppies in front of a cave, then two virile young men (called the Luperci) approached the altar, painted each other’s foreheads with the sacrificial blood, wiped it off with milk, and then had to start laughing (which I’m guessing wasn’t hard, provided the sacrificing puppies didn’t get you down too much). Then everybody ate, got drunk, and the Luperci then ran through the town dressed in goat skins and spanked people (particularly women who wanted to get pregnant) with mini-whips made of more goat-skin.

Now that’s a Valentine’s party for you – two drunken, nubile men running around town in loincloths spanking women.

A Catholic legend (according to history.com), which tells why we send cards on Valentine’s Day, says that one of those martyred Valentines fell in love with the jailer’s daughter while he was in prison (some say for marrying couples against the Emperor’s orders). Before he was executed, he left a note for her signed, “From your Valentine.”

During the Middle Ages, Chaucer made a reference to Valentines Day and love in a poem (potentially the first connection between the two) when he wrote:

Though why birds would be choosing their mates in February is anybody’s guess (and, according to wikipedia.org, he in fact wrote this for the engagement of two 15 year old royals, an agreement that was arranged on May 2, 1381)

Shakespeare includes a reference to Valentine’s Day during one of Ophelia’s rants… and the part of the play where (most people interpret) we find out that a lot of her crazy comes from Hamlet rejecting her after she, uh, gave it up:

To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn’d his clothes,
And dupp’d the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.

So, I’m going to go with pretty clearly, Halmark did not, in fact, invent Valentine’s Day. So no matter how you choose to celebrate it – cards and chocolates, deflowering innocent virgins, marrying off teenagers, a good old fashioned spanking (and I do mean old fashioned), or taking the new wave train of finding a way to say “I love you!” to yourself – I hope you have a good one!

In a New York Times article from awhile back (like May), Steve Jobs said in regards to the Kindle:

It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.

I didn’t realize that I didn’t read anymore.  But now I’ve been reading about the iPad (and I’m really going to resist commenting on the name, other than this aside in which I remind everyone that the name is infinitely commentable) and the pricing wars between Amazon and Mcmillan, and have decided that the modern world of book publishing, particularly in regards to the e-book market, is all fascinating and somewhat confusing and frustrating.

I own a Kindle. I love it muchly; it’s easy to use, carries more books than even I can read on vacation, is lightweight and very portable, and I was shocked by how much I just didn’t miss trying to read paper books in which the type was so close to the spine I had to practically rebreak the cover every time I turned a page. If, on the Kindle, I could organize my books into digital bookshelves (like I do at home – I have my own whacked out system that they will not come up with on their own), loan the books to friends, flip to other pages easily, and see the covers (and no, Nook’s “if I squint I can almost tell what that is” inch tall cover display doesn’t count), it would be perfect. Oh, and if I didn’t have this sense of impending doom that eventually I won’t be using a Kindle anymore (either because of tech envy or Kindle just goes the way of the 8track) and I will have lost a few hundred books that can only be read on an obsolete device. But, in the meantime, my bookshelves are staying at a comfortably groaning stasis, which makes my marriage a far better place to be. So the Kindle will stay.

Who knew? Technology and literature together make a powder keg. Oh. Wait. They always have by themselves; why would conjoining them make a difference?