in Life's name and for Life's sake

It has recently been brought to my attention that GLBT fiction has slowly been stripped of its Amazon.com sales rankings because it has been labeled "adult."

From Dear Author:

What’s going on?

For those who don’t know, Amazon has decided to derank and then remove from front page searches books labeled “erotic” and GLBT. For example, books that are about Lesbian parenting have been identified as “adult content” and deranked. Patti O’Shea’s book that is listed “erotic horror” despite having only one sex scene has been deranked and removed from front page search results. Amazon has deranked Annie Proulx, E.M. Forster, but not American Psycho. Mein Kampf and books about dog fighting are ranked and can be searched from the front page, but not books about gay love or books with erotic content.

You can track more of the deranked books on twitter.

Why is this is a big deal?

It’s not because customers put any stock into the Amazon Ranking number. It’s that the Amazon Rank affects a books’ visibility on the bestseller list, on the “If you Like ___, you might like __ feature” and so forth. It is akin to the bookstore removing the books from the shelves and requiring you to go to the Customer Service desk and ask for the book or author specifically. Visibility is a huge factor in sales and anyone who doesn’t believe that is kidding themselves.

More information from Dear Author can be found here, including a form letter you can send Amazon's customer service department expressing your disapproval. There is also a petition you can sign.

Mark R. Probst also has a discussion of how this de-ranking has affected him personally; his young adult novel The Filly, which he describes as a "gay western" and which, while it contains gay romance, contains no explicit content, has been removed from Amazon rankings. Similar removals include the

Another blog has initiated "google bombing" of the term Amazon Rank (click the link for a witty and appropriate definition of what Amazon rank has become).

This disgusts me. I firmly believe that it represents censorship, the limitations of the public -- everything Milton was writing against in Areopagitica, everything that our First Amendment was written to protect us against. I can understand not wanting truly adult material to show up in searches, but if that were Amazon.com's real intention, they could have made sure that all adult content is similarly blocked, straight erotica included. They could have done what LiveJournal does, and warned users that the content they are about to view may be unsuitable for children. They could have been up front about these policy changes. Instead, they have been operating in an underhanded manner, and attempted to use their extreme power over internet book-buying to turn Amazon Rank into a reflection of a very narrow vision of what is suitable content for adults.

Please pass this on to everyone you know. The blogosphere, thankfully, is dependent upon far too many individual providers for any singular instance of censorship to spread widely enough to silence us.

Watch this movie. I don't care if you're dying in the next five minutes, spend two of them on this. You won't be disappointed.

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Is poetry ever not relevant? Since before the Bible we have been saying the things that we really mean in poetry. This semester in school I'm reading poetry spanning the years from 1800 BCE to the present and it's hitting me more than ever how important poetry is to our way of life.

This, of course, comes with a caveat. Poetry as a form of expression and a way of exploring society and tension and life is important. This does not mean that every poem is important. It definitely does not mean that it's better to say a thing in poetry. It just means that poetry as an artform is an exceedingly important aspect of modern society in ways that people don't understand. Sure, few people go around carrying copies of Shakespeare or Milton or Whitman or Eliot, but how many people go around carrying iPods jam-packed with songs? Song is just a step up from spoken-word poetry. I don't think people realize that.

I don't always (read: very infrequently) agree with the contemporary conception of poetry in the literary sense. Most of the poems that I read for my poetry workshop course don’t have any emotional impact upon me. I cannot stand the postmodern/contemporary poetic system in which poems can be so obscure. I think that the purpose of the modern poet ought to be to write things that will make the modern audience feel.

In conjunction with that, I have issues with the current ideas about the connection between a poem and its meaning. Many of the poems I’ve been reading in Hejinian’s class are so opaque that you cannot see through them to the meaning--you cannot even feel through them to the meaning. I care less about seeing the obvious meaning of a poem the first time I read it than I do about being able to sense somewhere deep in my gut that this poem has purpose. Poems should not exist to hide meaning, they should exist to present it, in a condensed way that is understood by the subconscious, or by what I more frequently refer to as the gut. I want poetry that makes my stomach shiver. I want poetry that affects the primal sense still left within me, that sense that tends to frighten the modern civilized urbanite. Howl was such an explosion in its time because it got to the guts of these people who were not used to having their guts gotten to and who did not like to think of themselves as still possessing guts, having attempted to trade them in for stock options.

I want poetry for the people. I was thinking earlier about how no one reads poetry any more. Once, it was possible to make a living as a poet. Now? People hardly read any poetry at all, unless it’s in school. People do not turn to poetry for succor; people do not turn to literature of any kind for succor, but that is another, larger problem. I wasn’t there when this happened, so I can’t state with any certainty that it is the case, but it seems to me that when people started withdrawing from poetry, poets started withdrawing from people. And that was the greatest mistake they could make.

Like Wordsworth and Coleridge proclaimed in their introduction to the collection of poetry entitled Lyrical Ballads, published in 1800 (okay, so I'm an English geek, so sue me), we should have a poetry that celebrates the everyday human language by using it. Language should not be about obstruction of meaning, but rather about presentation of meaning. There is no need to use language deliberately intended to make the comprehension of the poem’s eventual goal more difficult. This is not to say that a poem cannot present itself on multiple levels--there are some poems that, when approached intellectually (ex. within a classroom or analytic setting) yield very different levels of content.

To me, it is acceptable for a poem to have no discernible symbolism, or connection to literary or poetic conceits. One does not need to be able to analyze a poem for it to be a good poem. But really--one ought to be able to call it a good poem if one is to spend time analyzing it!

...and that's my poetry rant for the moment.

In other news, the reason that I was on here was to post my favorite stupidity of the day. I just received my official election guide in the mail, and was idly browsing the arguments for and against certain propositions (okay, I'll admit it, I turned straight to the "controversial" ones, mostly for the purpose of seeing what the other side was saying and then laughing/pointing/screaming in outrage at their idiocy). But for me, nothing quite beats the title of one of the authors in support of Proposition 8: Jeralee Smith, Director of Education for the California Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays.

Um. Yeah. That's like saying, "Hey, faggot! We wanna be your friends!" Ex-gays and gays? Well isn't it nice that they're being inclusive. Let our ex-gays talk you out of your gay, too. You know, gay is like a country, you can leave whenever you like, like the expatriates. *fumes*

But back to the much more awesome topic of poetry! Not so awesome, because I have to write a paper about it, but still awesome, because it's poetry. Which is kind of what I ought to be doing right now -- working on my paper about Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." So I'm off to do that.

Final revision (I hope):

Tolerance seems like a value all should possess. The world is becoming smaller, and people rub shoulders with others whose personal values they can’t understand but don’t want to offend. Certainly tolerance is essential in maintaining peace between parties who disagree with each other but wish to keep from fighting. I used to be tolerant, but two years ago, one boy showed me the importance of a value greater than tolerance. Tony was the smartest kid in our grade, but he was also a good person, and we liked each other immediately.

I don’t remember when I learned he was gay. I think at first I heard it as a rumor, one I didn’t quite believe, but when he founded our school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, the rumors were validated. I didn’t attend, partly because I thought I would be out of place there, but also because I knew that going would put me out of place with my friends. I still heard what was going on, since the club’s founding members were in most of my classes. I heard stories of comments made in passing, signs announcing meeting times found in the trash, parents of members forbidding their children to attend. Aside from the names of the officers, the official club roster for that year was empty.

Still, the meetings continued; Tony stood even stronger when persecuted. I admired that strength within him, could not understand the criticism of my acquaintances, and finally reached the decision that I should do something, even if none of my friends would stand beside me. I wasn’t sure if I was doing the right thing, but it felt right, much more so than my previous inaction.

When GSA sponsored the Day of Silence, I was provided with the perfect opportunity to act. The idea was simple: participants would dress all in black and remain silent, to symbolize how victims of discrimination are silenced. I was nervous that day when I showed up in all black, afraid of what others would think of me. But when I walked to my first period class, and saw other black-clad students slowly joining me, I felt strong. The smile Tony gave me that morning was enough to get me through the day. The experience was an eye-opener: not just for those who saw how many of their peers wore black, but also for the participants, like myself, who realized that sometimes the best way to make use of freedom of speech is to say nothing at all.

This year, it’s rumored that the Christian Ministries club intends to put on a “Day of Truth” in opposition to our Day of Silence. Their plans are to wear all white, though what truths they’re telling I don’t know. Unconditional love for others regardless of differences is the greatest truth, and on whatever day they schedule, I’ll come wearing white--a shirt bearing the words, “‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater...”

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Any last-minute changes I should make before submitting the forms?

"Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?" - Ernest Gaines

We would like to know who really believes in gay rights on livejournal. There is no bribe of a miracle or anything like that. If you truly believe in gay rights, then repost this and title the post as "Gay Rights". If you don't believe in gay rights, then just ignore this. Thanks.

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.

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Ironic how my friend halfway across the country posted this on the same day as the first GSA meeting of the year. I got spontaneously promoted to publicity manager for the club -- it was really funny, Vida decided that I should be publicity and then announced that it was my job without even asking any of the other club officers. I love how stuff like that gets done. But I would've had a position anyway, had I heard when Tony was holding the meeting to elect officers!

This week just hasn't been good for me. It hasn't been bad, but it hasn't been good. I've been a lot more confrontational with people who annoy me. On the one hand it's good, because it's relieving not to have to put up a facade in front of certain people any more, and it's also shocking to see who agrees with you once you have the guts to bring it up. But on the other hand, it doesn't make me feel like a good person -- it makes me feel hypocritical, to demean a person for not being a good person. People in general have just had me annoyed this week. I think I'm getting over it, but I'm not quite sure.

Also, I think a little senioritis might be starting to set in. I hope not -- I'm doing everything in my power to keep it at bay. The problem is that last year I always had ridiculous amounts of work, so the only way for me to have time to relax was to make time. This year, I don't have to worrry about making time -- I already have it. And yet I still find myself making time, which makes problems.

On the bright side, I have discovered a beautiful song, and that helps more than you would think. Also, I love my new icon and I'm looking forward to November.

Finally: the other day in Spanish class, I had this crazy idea that I should write my novel in Spanish. I brushed it off as illogical for this year...but there's always next year. Really, I'd like the chance to write one in Latin or ancient Greek. I think, someday, I will.