October 05, 2024
Tokyo South
In this largely autobiographical account of the author's two-year proselyting mission to Japan during the late 1970s, a Mormon missionary is confronted by an overzealous religious bureaucracy and faces his own growing doubts as the work of preaching the gospel gets turned into a cynical and self-serving game of numbers and spiritual one-upmanship.
The first chapter of Tokyo South, "Lost in the Works," was the innagural story of my writing career. I'd signed up for a computer programming class at BYU and discovered that I liked using the Pascal editor as a crude word processor (this was back during the Apple II era) more than programming.
Then "Number Games" won second place in the 1984 Vera Hinckley Mayhew Awards, my first solid bit of external validation. (I doubt the story would be so well received today; I like to call the first half of the 1980s at Brigham Young University under President Jeffrey Holland its glasnost era.)
Over the last two decades, a series of reorganizations and consolidations and force reductions finally resulted in the the Tokyo North and South missions being reunited in 2007. This Ted Lyon interview makes it clear that the shenanigans I describe in Tokyo South were by no means unique to Japan.
If anything, time and nostalgia and the detached sense of sang-froid that comes with age and experience led me to pull my punches a bit.
Tokyo South will be made available at a later date.
The first chapter of Tokyo South, "Lost in the Works," was the innagural story of my writing career. I'd signed up for a computer programming class at BYU and discovered that I liked using the Pascal editor as a crude word processor (this was back during the Apple II era) more than programming.
Then "Number Games" won second place in the 1984 Vera Hinckley Mayhew Awards, my first solid bit of external validation. (I doubt the story would be so well received today; I like to call the first half of the 1980s at Brigham Young University under President Jeffrey Holland its glasnost era.)
Over the last two decades, a series of reorganizations and consolidations and force reductions finally resulted in the the Tokyo North and South missions being reunited in 2007. This Ted Lyon interview makes it clear that the shenanigans I describe in Tokyo South were by no means unique to Japan.
If anything, time and nostalgia and the detached sense of sang-froid that comes with age and experience led me to pull my punches a bit.
Tokyo South will be made available at a later date.
Related posts
The evolution
Tokyo South is alive
Tokyo South is dead
The weirdest two years
The problem with projections
Labels: books, BYU, ebooks, japan, japanese culture, kindle, peaks island press, publishing, religion, tokyo south
July 05, 2018
And then there was one
While it was nice to have a "backup" channel if you missed a show the first time around, KBYU couldn't help diluting KUED's audience and ratings, and dividing loyalties especially during membership drives.
BYU Broadcasting announced plans to consolidate its television operations, BYUtv, KBYU Channel Eleven and BYUtv International, into one nationwide television network. Similarly, BYU Broadcasting said it plans to consolidate its radio operations, BYUradio (on SiriusXM Satellite Radio) and KBYU-FM/Classical 89, into a single radio network.
But listeners to Utah's last classical radio station proved to be a scrappy bunch. They weren't going down without a fight. And they won. Earlier this year, BYU Broadcasting purchased KUMT-FM (107.9) to host BYUradio,
preserving [the only] over-the-air classical music station in Utah. Classical 89 will continue to operate on its current frequency at 89.1 and 89.5 (Southern Utah County) on the FM dial.
So make that a win-win-win.
Labels: business, BYU, radio, television, utah
May 27, 2013
Granite Flats
BYU-TV is BYU's satellite/cable outlet. When it's not broadcasting BYU sports and Mormon-specific religious events, it tries hard to be a generic, family-values, Christian broadcaster that anybody interested in generic family values would watch.The programming includes reruns of syndicated "family-values" shows like Doc (with Billy Ray Cyrus), Wind at My Back (from Kevin Sullivan), old Disney flicks (and clones of same), and PBS-style science/nature shows.
It also creates original in-house content, some of which is surprisingly not generic and even pretty good, like American Ride, Story Trek, and Audio-Files. The latest BYU-TV production is a first, a scripted drama series called Granite Flats.
Here, though, they started with a good idea and executed it so clumsily that I couldn't stop being fascinated by the cinematic train wreck that followed.
Granite Flats is a period piece that takes place in 1962 at and around an army base in Colorado. The night Arthur and his mother arrive in town (his father, we are led to believe, was a test pilot killed at Edwards) he sees a comet [sic] falling out of the sky.
The next day at school, he's befriended by Madeline, the school's Lisa Simpson, and Timmy, the youngest son of the town's chief of police. Timmy's not a brainiac like Arthur and Madeline, but makes up for it with sheer gregariousness. The Scooby Gang is thus formed.
At this point, I was pretty sure we were in for a cross between Encyclopedia Brown and Mad Scientist Club, with a little Detective Conan thrown in for good measure. And indeed, they soon set off to track down the comet [sic] that Arthur saw.
Incidentally, that "comet" is indicative of an underlying flaw in the show. These kids understand complex trigonometry. They can build a metal detector out of spare parts. They darn well know the difference between a comet and a meteor. Alas, the writers don't.
The Scoobies are tracking it down when an explosion levels the motor pool shop on the base, killing a mechanic. Frank, a patient at the base hospital where Beth (Arthur's mom) is a nurse, rushes to help. He comes back with hands burned "turning off the gas." A clue!
That evening, in the best, most intense scene in the whole series, Sergeant Jenkins, the guy in charge of the motor pool, shows his son (Wallace) how to clean his .45 while rambling on about a firefight that wiped out his platoon in Korea and getting steadily drunk.
Wallace slips the gun off the table and is walking away with it when Chief John Sanders (well-played by Richard Gunn) and MP Major Slim Kirkpatrick arrive to question Jenkins about the day's events. Jenkins immediately confesses to blowing up the motor pool.
Jenkins's confession is good enough for Kirkpatrick but Sanders isn't convinced and wants to dig further. The kids resume their hunt for the "comet."
Meanwhile, Beth's boss skulks around the hospital like the Cigarette Smoking Man on The X-Files, involved in a top-secret conspiracy that involves Frank. And future Al-Anon member Wallace gets taken in by one of the nurses at the army hospital.
Read more »
Labels: BYU, free-range kids, granite flats, religion, television reviews
September 08, 2011
Back to the digital future
In this blast from the past, John Dvorak goes back twenty-five years and discovers how resistant to change smart people can be (smart enough to run an Ivy League school), digging up this quote by Harvard University president Derek Bok:
BYU had completely digitized its card catalog system by 1985. When I started graduate school the next year, an IBM XT loaded with the ERIC index on CD-ROM showed up in the second floor reference section (I can still visualize where it was).
Talk about a breath of fresh air! The BC (before computer) system required pawing though two dozen telephone book-sized indexes (plus the quarterly supplements) year by year for every topic you wanted to research, again and again and again.
And then searching the stacks and praying that the journal was there (if the library even had it), hadn't been lost, misshelved, damaged, or checked out (permanently) by a professor. Enough of this nostalgia for the moldy smell of paper.
That was also when I bought my first PC, a used Kaypro II (2.5 MHz Z80, 64KB RAM). It cost me about a grand. Twenty years later, I paid the same amount (adjusted for inflation) for an IBM ThinkPad (1.7 GHz Pentium-M, 1GB RAM).
By the way, let's also can the hand-wringing over format obsolescence. I still have every file originally saved to those single-sided, 5.25 inch floppies. All of the papers physically typed on real paper and stored away in the BC years? Long gone.
In another sign of those ancient times, I was actually allowed to board airplanes with that Kaypro as a carry on! It had a practically bullet-proof aluminum case and weighed thirty pounds! Back then, though, any portable computer was exotic.
Harvard is not [emphasis added] committed to digitizing its library system or establishing a computer network between students and professors.
BYU had completely digitized its card catalog system by 1985. When I started graduate school the next year, an IBM XT loaded with the ERIC index on CD-ROM showed up in the second floor reference section (I can still visualize where it was).
Talk about a breath of fresh air! The BC (before computer) system required pawing though two dozen telephone book-sized indexes (plus the quarterly supplements) year by year for every topic you wanted to research, again and again and again.
And then searching the stacks and praying that the journal was there (if the library even had it), hadn't been lost, misshelved, damaged, or checked out (permanently) by a professor. Enough of this nostalgia for the moldy smell of paper.
That was also when I bought my first PC, a used Kaypro II (2.5 MHz Z80, 64KB RAM). It cost me about a grand. Twenty years later, I paid the same amount (adjusted for inflation) for an IBM ThinkPad (1.7 GHz Pentium-M, 1GB RAM).
By the way, let's also can the hand-wringing over format obsolescence. I still have every file originally saved to those single-sided, 5.25 inch floppies. All of the papers physically typed on real paper and stored away in the BC years? Long gone.
In another sign of those ancient times, I was actually allowed to board airplanes with that Kaypro as a carry on! It had a practically bullet-proof aluminum case and weighed thirty pounds! Back then, though, any portable computer was exotic.
Labels: BYU, computers, education, publishing, tech history
December 13, 2010
Set Apart
Haibane Renmei by Yoshitoshi ABe, directed by Tomokazu Tokoro, 2002.
Set Apart by Daniel Cronquist, WinePress Publishing, 2009 (ISBN 978-1414112565).
In a small town in a mid-20th century Eastern European country is the "Old Home," an orphanage whose residents are known as Haibane, or "gray wings." The Haibane are born from cocoons with no memories of their previous lives. They sprout flightless wings on their backs and wear glowing halos over their heads.
The story begins with the "birth" of the newest member, Rakka, and follows her life at the orphanage as she tries to remember who she is and what she is doing there. Couched as a modern fable—never digressing to explain itself—Haibane Renmei is an deeply moving study of character and personal redemption.
In his short monograph (running 80 numbered pages), Set Apart, Daniel Cronquist describes Haibane Renmei as "the most Christian anime I have ever seen. [It] has more spiritual truth in it than most American media." His book is an episode by episode analysis of the series from a Christian perspective.
Cronquist is not forcing an unwarranted religious interpretation onto the art. According to its writer and creator Yoshitoshi ABe [sic], Haibane Renmei "is not a story about any specific religion; but it is, nonetheless, a religious story" inspired by his own salvific experiences.
Though Cronquist approaches the subject from an Protestant perspective, nothing in his analysis should raise hackles in a Mormon audience. In fact, the elements of Haibane Renmei that Cronquist admits "exists outside of canonical theology" would likely be considered even less objectionable by Mormons.
Mormons should also be comfortable applying concepts such as the "veil of forgetfulness" and "spirit prison" (though I suspect ABe was thinking more of Catholic purgatory), and the "probationary state" (Alma 12:24) to key plot points.
As the Catholic Encyclopedia defines it:
Purgatory (Lat., "purgare", to make clean, to purify): in accordance with Catholic teaching is a place or condition of temporal punishment for those who, departing this life in God's grace, are not entirely free from venial faults, or have not fully paid the satisfaction due to their transgressions.
Cronquist expands on the unique metaphor ABe has devised to answer (we assume, though the symbolism is well-nigh perfect) the challenge in John 3:4, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?" The Haibane are "reborn" fully formed from their cocoons.
They are all children or young adults (lending support to a Catholic gloss). They live for an indeterminate amount of time and then vanish as mysteriously as they arrived.
The Haibane work alongside humans, living in the world but not of it. They amass no material goods for they can take nothing with them. Instead, "theirs is a world of spiritual growth—a second chance to move beyond what brought them there." Or as it says in Alma, "a space granted unto man in which he might repent."
Once the Haibane have come to terms with the sins that are keeping them grounded, they are are essentially "twinkled" in a "day of flight."
Cronquist's exegesis is clear, concise and insightful. Set Apart is organized as a lesson plan with discussion questions at the end of each chapter. It could easily serve as the textbook for a BYU religion course. Frankly, it'd be a lot more substantive than most of the required religion courses I took at BYU.
When it comes to Christian allegory that succeeds as art and metaphor, with Haibane Renmei Yoshitoshi ABe capably rises to the standard set by C.S. Lewis.
Labels: anime, book reviews, BYU, funimation, haibane, lds, personal favs, religion
July 16, 2010
He says "bucket loads"
This pitch-perfect parody raises the question of what to call a parody of a parody when the former makes a more serious point than the latter (in this case, a hilarious series of Old Spice body wash commercials mocking body wash commercials).
And if you didn't think he said what I thought he said before the closing shot (a bit of a jolt, that!) and seeing it was produced by the BYU Lee Library, then your soul is purer than mine (though that'd be funny too--hey, material for another parody).
UPDATE: CNN misheard it too and bleeped it. It's a lot clearer in the "making of" segment.
And if you didn't think he said what I thought he said before the closing shot (a bit of a jolt, that!) and seeing it was produced by the BYU Lee Library, then your soul is purer than mine (though that'd be funny too--hey, material for another parody).
UPDATE: CNN misheard it too and bleeped it. It's a lot clearer in the "making of" segment.
Labels: BYU, education, parody, television
October 01, 2009
Lost and found in translation
My sister Kate has been watching Lois & Clark with the French subtitles turned on. In one scene, Lois is goading Clark to abandon a particular demand, stating that "it will never happen." With added emphasis she asks (hypothetically), "How long can you hold your breath?"
As Lois stomps off, Clark (aka Superman) mutters, "A very, very long time."
The subtitles simply render Lois's questions as "How long can you be patient?" which misses the play on words. Kate asks if there is a French colloquialism that means the same thing, or are translators doomed to miss some jokes when they move from one language to the next?
The question reminds me of a Star Trek TNG episode where the Enterprise encounters an alien race that speaks only in allegory. It's one of those clever but stupid ideas. All language is allegorical. Even mathematicians have to agree on what the symbols mean before they can communicate using them.
Every translation system--human or machine--depends on a corpus of translated material to work from. Granted, in a universe where a "universal translator" is plausible technology, I suppose it makes sense (though in that case, even Douglas Adams's "Babel Fish" would be more scientifically realistic).
In sociolinguistic terms, the episode does make a nice point. Consider the story of Amaterasu and Ame no Uzume. Back at the dawn of time, after the Storm God, Susano'o, went on a holy tear and trashed her temples and fields, the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, shut herself inside a cave, plunging the world into darkness.
When deployed metaphorically (such as in the anime Maison Ikkoku), "Ame no Uzume" describes a woman acting sensuously in order to lure somebody (usually a man) out of his metaphorical cave. If the name is meaningless outside Japan, once it's defined in context, it's perfectly understandable.
Human nature is universal enough that in most cases the substance of the metaphor or pun can be translated along with the text. Getting hung up on "close literalism" is the greater obstacle. In my own work, if a metaphor is unique but still understandable, I'll keep it, even if it requires a parenthetical.
Otherwise, my approach is, "How would I phrase this if I wrote it?" I don't mind imprecise translations if they preserve the intent of the writer and the meaning the reader takes away. Often I'll "translate" the image or sense in my mind rather than the words of the metaphor itself.
The translator faces the same literary challenge as the writer. Except that distributors have to expeditiously turn around products at the "good enough" level. Not many have the deep pockets to do what Miramax (thanks to John Lasseter) did with Princess Mononoke, and hire Neil Gaiman to rewrite the script.
Additionally with dubs and subtitles, there's the whole matter of space and time constraints. Sometimes anime DVDs do add liner notes to explain cultural contexts. I like adding footnotes to my translations. It's easy to do online, though I suppose could make genre fiction look too "scholarly" and the typesetting a pain.
Alethea and Athena Nibley (BYU grads) write a column for Manga Life (scroll down to "Words of Truth and Wisdom"), examining the nuts and bolts of translation. In this interview, for example, they 'fess up to confusing "Aegis" as a type of cruiser (specifically the weapon system) with the name of a cruiser.
Translators have to know what the author knows. Here is a sentence I translated from Yashakiden: "These Magnum revolvers had a double-action trigger pull of seven pounds, with four pounds in single action." The grammar is straightforward. The challenge was to phrase it the way a gun expert would in English.
I was vaguely aware of the term "trigger pull," but googled it to see how it was actually used in context. (Google and Google Books are the translator's best friend. I'll often translate a complex sentence, stare at it and wonder, Does anybody actually say that in English? and google it to see.)
So I sympathize with subtitle translator Natsuko Toda--often given only a week or two to crank out the raw copy--whose work on Lord of the Rings provoked storms of protest. She simply didn't have the time to familiarize herself with the source material enough to capture its subtleties to the satisfaction of the fans.
The other lesson here is to avoid translating stuff when the fans know the story better than you do even before seeing it.
As Lois stomps off, Clark (aka Superman) mutters, "A very, very long time."
The subtitles simply render Lois's questions as "How long can you be patient?" which misses the play on words. Kate asks if there is a French colloquialism that means the same thing, or are translators doomed to miss some jokes when they move from one language to the next?
The question reminds me of a Star Trek TNG episode where the Enterprise encounters an alien race that speaks only in allegory. It's one of those clever but stupid ideas. All language is allegorical. Even mathematicians have to agree on what the symbols mean before they can communicate using them.
Every translation system--human or machine--depends on a corpus of translated material to work from. Granted, in a universe where a "universal translator" is plausible technology, I suppose it makes sense (though in that case, even Douglas Adams's "Babel Fish" would be more scientifically realistic).
In sociolinguistic terms, the episode does make a nice point. Consider the story of Amaterasu and Ame no Uzume. Back at the dawn of time, after the Storm God, Susano'o, went on a holy tear and trashed her temples and fields, the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, shut herself inside a cave, plunging the world into darkness.
Uzume overturned a tub near the cave entrance and began a dance on it, tearing off her clothing in front of the other deities. They considered this so comical that they laughed heartily at the sight. Amaterasu heard them and peered out to see what all the fuss was about.
When deployed metaphorically (such as in the anime Maison Ikkoku), "Ame no Uzume" describes a woman acting sensuously in order to lure somebody (usually a man) out of his metaphorical cave. If the name is meaningless outside Japan, once it's defined in context, it's perfectly understandable.
Human nature is universal enough that in most cases the substance of the metaphor or pun can be translated along with the text. Getting hung up on "close literalism" is the greater obstacle. In my own work, if a metaphor is unique but still understandable, I'll keep it, even if it requires a parenthetical.
Otherwise, my approach is, "How would I phrase this if I wrote it?" I don't mind imprecise translations if they preserve the intent of the writer and the meaning the reader takes away. Often I'll "translate" the image or sense in my mind rather than the words of the metaphor itself.
The translator faces the same literary challenge as the writer. Except that distributors have to expeditiously turn around products at the "good enough" level. Not many have the deep pockets to do what Miramax (thanks to John Lasseter) did with Princess Mononoke, and hire Neil Gaiman to rewrite the script.
Additionally with dubs and subtitles, there's the whole matter of space and time constraints. Sometimes anime DVDs do add liner notes to explain cultural contexts. I like adding footnotes to my translations. It's easy to do online, though I suppose could make genre fiction look too "scholarly" and the typesetting a pain.
Alethea and Athena Nibley (BYU grads) write a column for Manga Life (scroll down to "Words of Truth and Wisdom"), examining the nuts and bolts of translation. In this interview, for example, they 'fess up to confusing "Aegis" as a type of cruiser (specifically the weapon system) with the name of a cruiser.
Translators have to know what the author knows. Here is a sentence I translated from Yashakiden: "These Magnum revolvers had a double-action trigger pull of seven pounds, with four pounds in single action." The grammar is straightforward. The challenge was to phrase it the way a gun expert would in English.
I was vaguely aware of the term "trigger pull," but googled it to see how it was actually used in context. (Google and Google Books are the translator's best friend. I'll often translate a complex sentence, stare at it and wonder, Does anybody actually say that in English? and google it to see.)
So I sympathize with subtitle translator Natsuko Toda--often given only a week or two to crank out the raw copy--whose work on Lord of the Rings provoked storms of protest. She simply didn't have the time to familiarize herself with the source material enough to capture its subtleties to the satisfaction of the fans.
The other lesson here is to avoid translating stuff when the fans know the story better than you do even before seeing it.
Labels: BYU, japanese, kate, language, movies, star trek, translations
September 21, 2009
Defining "abstinence porn"
When it comes to "abstinence porn" as a literary device, I think it'd help to more precisely define the term, at least when used in the manner than I intend. Clarifying the actual application to narrative works is a goal for the future.
1. All revved up and someplace to go.
Etymologically, the flippant use of "porn" suggests a frisson created in the absence of plot. In anime it's called "fan service," gratuitous nudity and crude visual gags censored for broadcast but not in the DVD versions.
Drag racers "burn rubber" to heat up the tires and give them more grip. But we don't go to a race just to watch drivers spin their wheels. There's a finish line out there somewhere and we expect them to get to it eventually.
But the smoke and noise and spitting flame is fun to watch.
2. Movie stars don't look good by accident.
As long as the "fan service" doesn't cannibalize the tone or plot, I say the more the merrier. In fact, it seems to me that of late that the standard Hollywood genre fare doesn't contain enough beautiful naked women.
Most mainstream romance authors, on the other hand, know better than to leave the reader begging for more than a fleeting glimpse or well-placed sheet. Plot is a scaffold. What's hanging on it had better please the mind's eye.
3. It's not about commitment (or the lack of it).
In any kind of romantic narrative, keeping the leads apart while other subplots unfold is a major challenge to the writer. Though after a while, the tangled webs woven to accomplish this can begin to strain belief.
But this is "commitment porn," not abstinence porn. It's not enough that the couple in question be abstaining, but they must have something to abstain from. A real and present temptation. Commitment precedes abstinence.
4. Neither is it about plot development.
Except to show how much the leads really like each other. Compelling dramatic externalities that would keep them apart is, again, what we call "plot." Rather, its purpose is as stated in the Harlequin writer's guidelines:
Once we know that Buffy sleeping with Angel turns him into a psycho-killer, abstinence becomes logical. That there are forces conspiring to keep Romeo and Juliet apart is the whole point of the play.
The dying stuff aside, Romeo and Juliet is like two BYU students racing off to Wendover for a quickie wedding so they can satisfy their lusts "morally." Given the nature of the social constraints, it kinda makes sense.
Abstinence porn is not about the plot and it's not about making sense.
5. It's about putting out fires with gasoline.
Abstinence porn pretends to be celebrating chastity while reveling in carnality. Or as my brother puts it more bluntly, "Bella and Edward have lots of sex, just not intercourse." They have the cake and eat it too.
Twilight could be faulted for being like those anti-tobacco commercials that end up making smoking look cool. Though it took Deseret Book until volume four for some moralist in corporate to finally say, "Hey, wait a minute!"
Yet another case where DB "gets it" but for all the wrong reasons. When religions get pharisaical, the Pharisees deserve a hoisting by their own petards.
At the same time, as much as I like discussing it, I don't think much of the persuasive powers of "subtext." All the girls who read into Edward the very picture of the perfectly chivalrous boyfriend, all the power to them.
True, Bella trusts Edward the way no teenage girl should ever trust a teenage boy. Fantasy is fun for its ability to disentangle obvious causes and likely effects. That's why we say it's "made up" and call it "make-believe."
6. But a man's still got to know his limits.
For abstinence porn to produce friction and heat, prohibitions must exist. Take the foot off the brake at the wrong time and the car burning rubber will careen into a brick wall. The forces must balance out (ideally until marriage).
Yet if the external forces are too powerful, we don't end up with abstinence porn but The Scarlet Letter. There must be enough play left so that the needle cranks into the red zone before coming to a screeching halt.
If the desire is equal and balanced, then the woman drawing the line is a dog-bites-man story. Hence Meyer's brilliant stroke of having Edward draw the line and turning the standard male escapism into a female fantasy.
As my sister Kate observes, "Bella gets to say, Let's get it on! without having to worry that the male will say, Alrighty, then!
Granted, "I love you so much I won't" sounds like a sermon by Boyd K. Packer, except that Edward is hanging those stagecoach wheels right off the edge of the abyss while promising not to end up at the bottom of the gully.
Like the little warning says down at the bottom of the screen during car commercials: "Closed track and professional driver."
7. There's nothing new under the sun.
Any genre with the insatiable demand and enormous supply of romance has been there and done that a thousand times over. But Meyer pulled off something unique in Twilight, a literary feat that's probably not reproducible.
I don't think she planned it that way. She simply said, "Oh, let's pretend that when it comes to sex, men are still all chivalrous and everything like in the fairy tales." And millions of girls said, "Oh, yes, let's!"
Lucas pulled an old monomyth of the hat in Star Wars--and didn't know what he did. Joseph Campbell explaining it to him didn't help. Like Lucas, I wonder if Meyer--or anybody--can trap that light in a bottle again.
8. So you write what you know.
While Meyer's one-off can't be taken as a template, the basic principles are worth a long look. Abstinence porn typically thrives in historical settings, but the right modern religious context could work too.
I believe a big reason that Meyer made it work was because she knows whereof she speaks. The series ends the way it does because according to Meyer's world view, abstinence ends with marriage and sex. That's the whole point!
She just never came out and explained why.
The official Mormon position on the "Law of Chastity" might obviate my requirement against externalities. But the church's ecclesiastical bark is louder than its bite and modern mores bend the tree awfully far over.
To put it cynically, the tree doesn't fall in the forest if nobody hears it. Or confesses to chopping it down. To clarify, I'm not belittling such proscriptions, just pointing out that they do not incur a physical risk to life.
When it comes to contemporary American culture, Mormons are practically alone in living though the Sturm und Drang of abstinence porn. They should figure out how to take advantage of that fact.
1. All revved up and someplace to go.
Etymologically, the flippant use of "porn" suggests a frisson created in the absence of plot. In anime it's called "fan service," gratuitous nudity and crude visual gags censored for broadcast but not in the DVD versions.
Drag racers "burn rubber" to heat up the tires and give them more grip. But we don't go to a race just to watch drivers spin their wheels. There's a finish line out there somewhere and we expect them to get to it eventually.
But the smoke and noise and spitting flame is fun to watch.
2. Movie stars don't look good by accident.
As long as the "fan service" doesn't cannibalize the tone or plot, I say the more the merrier. In fact, it seems to me that of late that the standard Hollywood genre fare doesn't contain enough beautiful naked women.
Most mainstream romance authors, on the other hand, know better than to leave the reader begging for more than a fleeting glimpse or well-placed sheet. Plot is a scaffold. What's hanging on it had better please the mind's eye.
3. It's not about commitment (or the lack of it).
In any kind of romantic narrative, keeping the leads apart while other subplots unfold is a major challenge to the writer. Though after a while, the tangled webs woven to accomplish this can begin to strain belief.
But this is "commitment porn," not abstinence porn. It's not enough that the couple in question be abstaining, but they must have something to abstain from. A real and present temptation. Commitment precedes abstinence.
4. Neither is it about plot development.
Except to show how much the leads really like each other. Compelling dramatic externalities that would keep them apart is, again, what we call "plot." Rather, its purpose is as stated in the Harlequin writer's guidelines:
We want to see an emphasis on the physical relationship developing between the couple: fully described love scenes along with a high level of fantasy, playfulness and eroticism are needed.
Once we know that Buffy sleeping with Angel turns him into a psycho-killer, abstinence becomes logical. That there are forces conspiring to keep Romeo and Juliet apart is the whole point of the play.
The dying stuff aside, Romeo and Juliet is like two BYU students racing off to Wendover for a quickie wedding so they can satisfy their lusts "morally." Given the nature of the social constraints, it kinda makes sense.
Abstinence porn is not about the plot and it's not about making sense.
5. It's about putting out fires with gasoline.
Abstinence porn pretends to be celebrating chastity while reveling in carnality. Or as my brother puts it more bluntly, "Bella and Edward have lots of sex, just not intercourse." They have the cake and eat it too.
Twilight could be faulted for being like those anti-tobacco commercials that end up making smoking look cool. Though it took Deseret Book until volume four for some moralist in corporate to finally say, "Hey, wait a minute!"
Yet another case where DB "gets it" but for all the wrong reasons. When religions get pharisaical, the Pharisees deserve a hoisting by their own petards.
At the same time, as much as I like discussing it, I don't think much of the persuasive powers of "subtext." All the girls who read into Edward the very picture of the perfectly chivalrous boyfriend, all the power to them.
True, Bella trusts Edward the way no teenage girl should ever trust a teenage boy. Fantasy is fun for its ability to disentangle obvious causes and likely effects. That's why we say it's "made up" and call it "make-believe."
6. But a man's still got to know his limits.
For abstinence porn to produce friction and heat, prohibitions must exist. Take the foot off the brake at the wrong time and the car burning rubber will careen into a brick wall. The forces must balance out (ideally until marriage).
Yet if the external forces are too powerful, we don't end up with abstinence porn but The Scarlet Letter. There must be enough play left so that the needle cranks into the red zone before coming to a screeching halt.
If the desire is equal and balanced, then the woman drawing the line is a dog-bites-man story. Hence Meyer's brilliant stroke of having Edward draw the line and turning the standard male escapism into a female fantasy.
As my sister Kate observes, "Bella gets to say, Let's get it on! without having to worry that the male will say, Alrighty, then!
Granted, "I love you so much I won't" sounds like a sermon by Boyd K. Packer, except that Edward is hanging those stagecoach wheels right off the edge of the abyss while promising not to end up at the bottom of the gully.
Like the little warning says down at the bottom of the screen during car commercials: "Closed track and professional driver."
7. There's nothing new under the sun.
Any genre with the insatiable demand and enormous supply of romance has been there and done that a thousand times over. But Meyer pulled off something unique in Twilight, a literary feat that's probably not reproducible.
I don't think she planned it that way. She simply said, "Oh, let's pretend that when it comes to sex, men are still all chivalrous and everything like in the fairy tales." And millions of girls said, "Oh, yes, let's!"
Lucas pulled an old monomyth of the hat in Star Wars--and didn't know what he did. Joseph Campbell explaining it to him didn't help. Like Lucas, I wonder if Meyer--or anybody--can trap that light in a bottle again.
8. So you write what you know.
While Meyer's one-off can't be taken as a template, the basic principles are worth a long look. Abstinence porn typically thrives in historical settings, but the right modern religious context could work too.
I believe a big reason that Meyer made it work was because she knows whereof she speaks. The series ends the way it does because according to Meyer's world view, abstinence ends with marriage and sex. That's the whole point!
She just never came out and explained why.
The official Mormon position on the "Law of Chastity" might obviate my requirement against externalities. But the church's ecclesiastical bark is louder than its bite and modern mores bend the tree awfully far over.
To put it cynically, the tree doesn't fall in the forest if nobody hears it. Or confesses to chopping it down. To clarify, I'm not belittling such proscriptions, just pointing out that they do not incur a physical risk to life.
When it comes to contemporary American culture, Mormons are practically alone in living though the Sturm und Drang of abstinence porn. They should figure out how to take advantage of that fact.
Related posts
Abstinence porn
Selling the sizzle
Labels: BYU, criticism, deep thoughts, lds, meyer, sex, thinking about writing, twilight
June 04, 2009
H is for Hobson's choice
My sister wonders why men are driven to such incessant philosophizing about the existential facts of life that otherwise seem painfully obvious.
Well, as Tim Allen observes, from childhood on, the average man faces a binary choice in life: get a job or go to jail. Everything he dreams of or aspires to rides on this choice. Moreover, he is not guaranteed that the work he does will be "fulfilling." In fact, he will often be warned against nurturing that expectation.
So about the time the pragmatic fruits of this Hobson's choice have been exhausted--middle age or so--it is hardly surprising that he should initiate a cost-benefit analysis and come up short. Religion steps into the gap (and gurus like Wayne Dyer simply repackage religion for SWPL sensibilities).
A German study recently found that "A man's chances of dying early are cut by a fifth if their bride is between 15 and 17 years his junior." This makes sense. The age difference means that at middle age, a man's traditionally-defined role will still be operational. And when completed, he can step right out of that role into retirement.
Thinking reductively, I think this is a primary attraction of sports and technical publications and "business heroes," as a male analogue to romance: it offers to men the idealization of the "perfect job" and "fulfilling" work. Men dream of financially-rewarding work they enjoy just as women dream of Prince Charming.
Religion also offers a justification for the third unmentionable option: doing nothing. Bum-hood. But in religion it's called being a priest and makes not earning a living and raising a family acceptable. The appeal of the "lone wolf," of Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter and Kurosawa's Yojimbo, is the secular version of being a monk.
The arts and academia make for good substitute religions, hence the grudging respect (and envy) for the "starving artist," though only so far as he's not actually starving. Lone wolves are more attractive conceptually than in practice (which is why single men can't get tenure at BYU).
Religious and secular priesthoods also offer accessible hierarchies to hierarchy-hungry men, who at middle aged will be resigning themselves to the fact that they will be beta males forever. Although I have no interest in them myself, I'm not sure that, long term, invading all of these domains is a wise thing for women to do.
The anime series Kanon similarly argues that the one effective way to work through your "issues" is to do good by others. The teen protagonist, though, is a lone wolf type disengaged from social politics and hierarchies, much like the sadly-departed David Carradine's philosophizing warrior monk in Kung Fu.
Well, as Tim Allen observes, from childhood on, the average man faces a binary choice in life: get a job or go to jail. Everything he dreams of or aspires to rides on this choice. Moreover, he is not guaranteed that the work he does will be "fulfilling." In fact, he will often be warned against nurturing that expectation.
So about the time the pragmatic fruits of this Hobson's choice have been exhausted--middle age or so--it is hardly surprising that he should initiate a cost-benefit analysis and come up short. Religion steps into the gap (and gurus like Wayne Dyer simply repackage religion for SWPL sensibilities).
A German study recently found that "A man's chances of dying early are cut by a fifth if their bride is between 15 and 17 years his junior." This makes sense. The age difference means that at middle age, a man's traditionally-defined role will still be operational. And when completed, he can step right out of that role into retirement.
Thinking reductively, I think this is a primary attraction of sports and technical publications and "business heroes," as a male analogue to romance: it offers to men the idealization of the "perfect job" and "fulfilling" work. Men dream of financially-rewarding work they enjoy just as women dream of Prince Charming.
Religion also offers a justification for the third unmentionable option: doing nothing. Bum-hood. But in religion it's called being a priest and makes not earning a living and raising a family acceptable. The appeal of the "lone wolf," of Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter and Kurosawa's Yojimbo, is the secular version of being a monk.
The arts and academia make for good substitute religions, hence the grudging respect (and envy) for the "starving artist," though only so far as he's not actually starving. Lone wolves are more attractive conceptually than in practice (which is why single men can't get tenure at BYU).
Religious and secular priesthoods also offer accessible hierarchies to hierarchy-hungry men, who at middle aged will be resigning themselves to the fact that they will be beta males forever. Although I have no interest in them myself, I'm not sure that, long term, invading all of these domains is a wise thing for women to do.
The anime series Kanon similarly argues that the one effective way to work through your "issues" is to do good by others. The teen protagonist, though, is a lone wolf type disengaged from social politics and hierarchies, much like the sadly-departed David Carradine's philosophizing warrior monk in Kung Fu.
Labels: BYU, deep thoughts, kate, social studies
May 20, 2009
Who needs 500 channels?
With my SUPERDish, I get another two dozen free channels in addition to the handful of Asian channels I was already getting, Christian, public access, and shopping networks. And CSPAN and NASA ("Making space exploration as boring as CSPAN!"). Plus the countless PPV sports, porn and movie channels.
The best free channels are Research and UCTV and NASA. (During an actual mission, that is. The Hubble Repair Mission was like This Old House in space. The ISS is boring. What's it supposed to be there for, again?) BYU has a channel too, but it's as dull as CSPAN.
That's not counting the 500+ channels I could choose from with a domestic programming package. It strikes me as a goofy business model that only makes sense if the marginal cost of each new channel is minimal compared to the profit from adding each new paying-through-the-nose customer.
Though a "pure" a la carte system is equally unworkable unless, like TV Japan or the Wall Street Journal, a very specific demand is met by a very specific supply. A la carte plus over-the-air works fine for me.
Mark Cuban says that the Internet can't compete with established broadband delivery networks. I think he's right. On-demand SD television over the Internet would become a bandwidth hog, especially in the local loop (until fiber reaches the home in significant numbers). Forget about HD.
Heretic that I am, I also think ISPs should meter or even block file sharing ports. We're in classic tragedy-of-the-commons territory here. Hey, considering the bandwidth even cheapo web hosting plans allow, if you have to depend on file sharing, then your business is way undercapitalized.
I've never been sold on the next great technology that promises to turn your computer into an "interactive TV." Just because computers and televisions look like each other doesn't mean they are each other. The only thing I want to interact with while watching TV is the remote.
Satellite and cable could implement the on-demand programming using current DVR technology. Basically the Netflix model, but streamed or trickled over unused sidebands. But perhaps people don't want to think even that hard about it. They just want to pick up the remote and watch "whatever's on."
The best free channels are Research and UCTV and NASA. (During an actual mission, that is. The Hubble Repair Mission was like This Old House in space. The ISS is boring. What's it supposed to be there for, again?) BYU has a channel too, but it's as dull as CSPAN.
That's not counting the 500+ channels I could choose from with a domestic programming package. It strikes me as a goofy business model that only makes sense if the marginal cost of each new channel is minimal compared to the profit from adding each new paying-through-the-nose customer.
Though a "pure" a la carte system is equally unworkable unless, like TV Japan or the Wall Street Journal, a very specific demand is met by a very specific supply. A la carte plus over-the-air works fine for me.
Mark Cuban says that the Internet can't compete with established broadband delivery networks. I think he's right. On-demand SD television over the Internet would become a bandwidth hog, especially in the local loop (until fiber reaches the home in significant numbers). Forget about HD.
Heretic that I am, I also think ISPs should meter or even block file sharing ports. We're in classic tragedy-of-the-commons territory here. Hey, considering the bandwidth even cheapo web hosting plans allow, if you have to depend on file sharing, then your business is way undercapitalized.
I've never been sold on the next great technology that promises to turn your computer into an "interactive TV." Just because computers and televisions look like each other doesn't mean they are each other. The only thing I want to interact with while watching TV is the remote.
Satellite and cable could implement the on-demand programming using current DVR technology. Basically the Netflix model, but streamed or trickled over unused sidebands. But perhaps people don't want to think even that hard about it. They just want to pick up the remote and watch "whatever's on."
Labels: BYU, dish, netflix, technology, television, tv japan
March 17, 2009
The coming Christian collapse
A provocative screed by Michael Spencer argues that "We are on the verge of a major collapse of Evangelical Christianity." Frankly, in a lot of places in his essay, you could substitute "Mormon" for "Evangelical" and hit the nail right on the head. For example:
Though I think Spencer underestimates the ability of organizations to sustain themselves through "churn" (any missionary who went through a "baptism bubble" understands that), and to maintain themselves primarily as social clubs and welfare organizations (very 19th century, that).
Religion isn't the opiate of the masses. It's "all you really need to know about philosophy and psychology and child-rearing" for the masses. This is why New Age gurus like Wayne Dyer are such hits on Utah PBS stations, including KBYU. They celebrate the transcendental aspects of religion people are looking for better than most adherents.
What Spencer is detecting rather is the equivalent of a traffic jam "wave function" moving down a highway long after the original obstruction has been cleared. With a belief system centered around "orthodoxy," he foresees that this tide of excitement will move on, leaving him and his theological allies again in the shallows.
But if your only interest in orthodoxy is in disciplinary terms (you need it to determine who can belong to the club), then your overriding concern will be to stay on top of the wave, making sure that wherever the wave is, you are.
Consider how both sides of the abortion debate need each other to keep the issue alive and the wave centered on them. A reasonable accommodation like Scalia's Heller decision--that there is a "right" but it's up to states to determine exactly what it is--and the wave would move on, leaving only the mud flats behind (have I exhausted this metaphor yet?).
Still, I don't think this is a totally egocentric concern. When the waters get too shallow, as in Europe, the next arriving tide of true believers may sweep them all away. The question is how fast the secular holes in the dike will drain away the fervor. Fortunately, like first-world population collapse, the U.S. won't be first in line. Or last.
Though as the latest American Religious Identification Survey shows, over almost two decades, not even the once much-heralded Mormons are growing relative to the U.S. population. (This survey doesn't count butts in pews and the numbers are still only half "officially reported.") Granted, in this environment, minimally holding your own is at least par for the course.
Asian Times columnist Spengler argues that China will be the next Evangelical beachhead. During the 16th century (until the Tokugawa regime brutally repressed it), Catholicism was remarkably successful in Japan. The Jesuits had no army backing them up, except through alliances they forged with local warlords (some of whom became stalwart converts).
Of course, the Jesuits had the intellectual chops to go toe-to-toe with equally well-educated Buddhists priests, something Spencer persuasively argues is lacking among today's Evangelicals, and this applies equally well to Mormons.
One of the sadly funny things about Evangelical anti-Mormon sites is that they assume--based on the tiny sample of Mormon apologists they tussle with--that everybody else knows and cares about "heretical" Mormon theology as much as they do. But practically nobody knows or cares about Mormon theology as much as they do! Including Mormons!
That, I'm afraid, is the church's future. When both sides get tired of offending each other--and when Mormons win the "respect" they so desperately crave--the wave will have already moved on.
The [Mormon] investment in moral, social, and political issues has depleted our resources and exposed our weaknesses. Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of [Mormons] can't articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith.
Though I think Spencer underestimates the ability of organizations to sustain themselves through "churn" (any missionary who went through a "baptism bubble" understands that), and to maintain themselves primarily as social clubs and welfare organizations (very 19th century, that).
Religion isn't the opiate of the masses. It's "all you really need to know about philosophy and psychology and child-rearing" for the masses. This is why New Age gurus like Wayne Dyer are such hits on Utah PBS stations, including KBYU. They celebrate the transcendental aspects of religion people are looking for better than most adherents.
What Spencer is detecting rather is the equivalent of a traffic jam "wave function" moving down a highway long after the original obstruction has been cleared. With a belief system centered around "orthodoxy," he foresees that this tide of excitement will move on, leaving him and his theological allies again in the shallows.
But if your only interest in orthodoxy is in disciplinary terms (you need it to determine who can belong to the club), then your overriding concern will be to stay on top of the wave, making sure that wherever the wave is, you are.
Consider how both sides of the abortion debate need each other to keep the issue alive and the wave centered on them. A reasonable accommodation like Scalia's Heller decision--that there is a "right" but it's up to states to determine exactly what it is--and the wave would move on, leaving only the mud flats behind (have I exhausted this metaphor yet?).
Still, I don't think this is a totally egocentric concern. When the waters get too shallow, as in Europe, the next arriving tide of true believers may sweep them all away. The question is how fast the secular holes in the dike will drain away the fervor. Fortunately, like first-world population collapse, the U.S. won't be first in line. Or last.
Though as the latest American Religious Identification Survey shows, over almost two decades, not even the once much-heralded Mormons are growing relative to the U.S. population. (This survey doesn't count butts in pews and the numbers are still only half "officially reported.") Granted, in this environment, minimally holding your own is at least par for the course.
Asian Times columnist Spengler argues that China will be the next Evangelical beachhead. During the 16th century (until the Tokugawa regime brutally repressed it), Catholicism was remarkably successful in Japan. The Jesuits had no army backing them up, except through alliances they forged with local warlords (some of whom became stalwart converts).
Of course, the Jesuits had the intellectual chops to go toe-to-toe with equally well-educated Buddhists priests, something Spencer persuasively argues is lacking among today's Evangelicals, and this applies equally well to Mormons.
One of the sadly funny things about Evangelical anti-Mormon sites is that they assume--based on the tiny sample of Mormon apologists they tussle with--that everybody else knows and cares about "heretical" Mormon theology as much as they do. But practically nobody knows or cares about Mormon theology as much as they do! Including Mormons!
That, I'm afraid, is the church's future. When both sides get tired of offending each other--and when Mormons win the "respect" they so desperately crave--the wave will have already moved on.
Labels: buddhism, BYU, deep thoughts, lds, religion, social studies
July 26, 2008
Yet more AFS "uproar"
Moriah Jovan examines the TBM (true believing Mormon) blogs so I don't have to. I need to subscribe to the "your soul's being damned" mailing list so I can get clued into this stuff earlier. I feel in the mood for some Meat Loaf.
UPDATE: C.H. Hanson scouts out some more TBM blog comments. Picture me holding my head in my hands like John Dvorak. I just don't get it!
Luckily for Orson Scott Card, nobody but a few science fiction and fantasy geeks have read Hart's Hope or Maps in a Mirror. I've read that he's caught flack for making the women in his (Shadow Mountain, nee Deseret Book) "Women of Genesis" series human.
So I shouldn't be surprised, except that somebody who would be offended by books like that should turn away at the sight of the front cover of Angel Falling Softly (now being referred to as "AFS" in some quarters) alone.
But what springs foremost to mind is the same flabbergasted reaction I had when I first came to Utah from the "mission field" and encountered at BYU the thin scriptural and doctrinal comprehension of kids who had attended time-release seminary for the past three or four years.
I could imagine Evangelicals taking me to task for stressing Rachel's maniacally works-centered concept of grace (it's their number one beef, after all), but Mormons?
The weirdest accusation is that this was some sort of nefarious plan to undermine the morals of the Youth of Zion. Okay, that was the plan, but it didn't fit into the fifty-dollar advertising budget (I kid, I kid, though not about the budget).
In any event, Zarahemla Books has a website. The catalog listing at Zarahemla points to my website, which in turn points to my blog. Note the tricky URLs I use. Google my name and both come up at the top of the list.
Yes, it'd be nice to fancy myself a mysterious, shadowy Dashiell Hammett type, slinking through the back alleys of the Big City. Alas, on the Internet, I am a literary open book.
And because this issue has been raised in counterpoint, I would also like to point out that nowhere in Zarahemla's listing or anywhere on my website is Angel Falling Softly described as "LDS fiction."
UPDATE: C.H. Hanson scouts out some more TBM blog comments. Picture me holding my head in my hands like John Dvorak. I just don't get it!Luckily for Orson Scott Card, nobody but a few science fiction and fantasy geeks have read Hart's Hope or Maps in a Mirror. I've read that he's caught flack for making the women in his (Shadow Mountain, nee Deseret Book) "Women of Genesis" series human.
So I shouldn't be surprised, except that somebody who would be offended by books like that should turn away at the sight of the front cover of Angel Falling Softly (now being referred to as "AFS" in some quarters) alone.
But what springs foremost to mind is the same flabbergasted reaction I had when I first came to Utah from the "mission field" and encountered at BYU the thin scriptural and doctrinal comprehension of kids who had attended time-release seminary for the past three or four years.
I could imagine Evangelicals taking me to task for stressing Rachel's maniacally works-centered concept of grace (it's their number one beef, after all), but Mormons?
The weirdest accusation is that this was some sort of nefarious plan to undermine the morals of the Youth of Zion. Okay, that was the plan, but it didn't fit into the fifty-dollar advertising budget (I kid, I kid, though not about the budget).
In any event, Zarahemla Books has a website. The catalog listing at Zarahemla points to my website, which in turn points to my blog. Note the tricky URLs I use. Google my name and both come up at the top of the list.
Yes, it'd be nice to fancy myself a mysterious, shadowy Dashiell Hammett type, slinking through the back alleys of the Big City. Alas, on the Internet, I am a literary open book.
And because this issue has been raised in counterpoint, I would also like to point out that nowhere in Zarahemla's listing or anywhere on my website is Angel Falling Softly described as "LDS fiction."
Labels: angel falling softly, angel reviews, BYU, lds, moral outrage
June 06, 2008
Tokyo South is dead
Long live Tokyo South!
I haven't been keeping up on church reorganizations in Japan, so this news comes to me rather late. But an email from a recent Tokyo South RM confirms that the mission is no more. A bit of research turned up this note in the Church News, February 10, 2007:
Essentially, the Tokyo mission structure has returned to the state it was in when I stepped onto Japanese soil thirty years ago, a few months after the creation of the Tokyo South mission out of the Nagoya and Tokyo missions. My first senior companions were from the Nagoya mission.
My correspondent describes the final days of Tokyo South as a mirror image of its opening days (a good thing, by the way). In another strange turn of events, Kobe mission was reopened. I'd kept the Kobe mission alive in The Path of Dreams for purposes of plot. Now it's alive for real.
Sociologically, this is a curious move. It's like closing the Los Angeles mission and opening one up in Bakersfield. An effort, perhaps, to save the church from the missionaries.
I haven't been keeping up on church reorganizations in Japan, so this news comes to me rather late. But an email from a recent Tokyo South RM confirms that the mission is no more. A bit of research turned up this note in the Church News, February 10, 2007:
Portions of the Japan Tokyo North Mission and Japan Tokyo South Mission are being consolidated and will be known as the Japan Tokyo Mission. The newly aligned Japan Tokyo Mission will be concentrated around the greater Tokyo metropolitan area and its 10 stakes.
Essentially, the Tokyo mission structure has returned to the state it was in when I stepped onto Japanese soil thirty years ago, a few months after the creation of the Tokyo South mission out of the Nagoya and Tokyo missions. My first senior companions were from the Nagoya mission.
My correspondent describes the final days of Tokyo South as a mirror image of its opening days (a good thing, by the way). In another strange turn of events, Kobe mission was reopened. I'd kept the Kobe mission alive in The Path of Dreams for purposes of plot. Now it's alive for real.
Sociologically, this is a curious move. It's like closing the Los Angeles mission and opening one up in Bakersfield. An effort, perhaps, to save the church from the missionaries.
Related posts
How it began
The evolution
Tokyo South is alive
The weirdest two years
The problem with projections
Labels: BYU, japan, peaks island press, religion, tokyo south
April 24, 2008
Home literature
When I say that The Path of Dreams belongs in part to the "home literature" genre, I'm referring to Orson F. Whitney's original defense (made back in 1888) of fiction written specifically for the spiritual and moral edification of the religious community.
I see "home literature" as a direct extension of the stories I once wrote for The New Era. Or to be more precise, the kind of stories I would write if I didn't have to deal with Correlation, but without altering the overall approach or underlying intent.
In other words, taking Chris Bigelow's definition of "provocative, unconventional, yet ultimately faith-affirming stories that yield new insights into Mormon culture and humanity" (which I am totally on board with), here I would exclude from those first two adjective anything violating theological or moral standards.
Now, Whitney more specifically challenged writers to
The second clause in that sentence sets the bar far higher than the humble target I'm shooting at here. Namely, to remain faithful to the objectives of "home literature"--fiction that remains entirely within the community of believers--yet at the same time wedges into the niche occupied by the modern, secular, genre romance.
The two would obviously seem incompatible from the start. As explained by the Harlequin writer's guidelines:
Hard to accomplish--and keep the protagonists temple recommend worthy--when marriage is the goal the plot leads up to. In The Path of Dreams, I came up with a clever (I think) end-run around this problem, though not one that could be deployed formulaically.
Moreover, by inserting a pivot point into the story--the marriage halfway through--those moral constraints (against romanticizing premarital sex) could be set aside for the remainder of the story.
A second reason is that, taking Austen as the classic romance template, by the time the engagement arrived with the certainty of marriage in the historical romance, the social structure of the lovers' lives thenceforth was determined. This is definitely not the case in a BYU romance (to take one sub-sub-genre).
Erica Friedman points out the problem of "stories end[ing] where they should begin." That is, they end with declarations of love and the decision to marry (or the marriage itself), when "what comes next" is really more interesting.
With the plot centered around the marital pivot point, the narrative will veer from strict romance to what I might call "family formation melodrama." The challenge, then, is to keep a firm grasp of the erotic thread and not turn into a dreary soap or one of those painfully unfunny sit-coms about what is in actuality an intolerably dysfunctional marriage.
Of course, we citizens of Utah County know that Mormons happily read (gentile) romance novels and attend R-rated movies at pretty much the same rates as the rest of suburban America. Whether such a genre with a "Mormon" label on the cover could survive that cognitive disconnect is another question.
I see "home literature" as a direct extension of the stories I once wrote for The New Era. Or to be more precise, the kind of stories I would write if I didn't have to deal with Correlation, but without altering the overall approach or underlying intent.
In other words, taking Chris Bigelow's definition of "provocative, unconventional, yet ultimately faith-affirming stories that yield new insights into Mormon culture and humanity" (which I am totally on board with), here I would exclude from those first two adjective anything violating theological or moral standards.
Now, Whitney more specifically challenged writers to
Make books yourselves that shall not only be a credit to you and to the land and people that produced you, but likewise a boon and benefaction to mankind.
The second clause in that sentence sets the bar far higher than the humble target I'm shooting at here. Namely, to remain faithful to the objectives of "home literature"--fiction that remains entirely within the community of believers--yet at the same time wedges into the niche occupied by the modern, secular, genre romance.
The two would obviously seem incompatible from the start. As explained by the Harlequin writer's guidelines:
We want to see an emphasis on the physical relationship developing between the couple: fully described love scenes along with a high level of fantasy, playfulness and eroticism are needed.
Hard to accomplish--and keep the protagonists temple recommend worthy--when marriage is the goal the plot leads up to. In The Path of Dreams, I came up with a clever (I think) end-run around this problem, though not one that could be deployed formulaically.
Moreover, by inserting a pivot point into the story--the marriage halfway through--those moral constraints (against romanticizing premarital sex) could be set aside for the remainder of the story.
A second reason is that, taking Austen as the classic romance template, by the time the engagement arrived with the certainty of marriage in the historical romance, the social structure of the lovers' lives thenceforth was determined. This is definitely not the case in a BYU romance (to take one sub-sub-genre).
Erica Friedman points out the problem of "stories end[ing] where they should begin." That is, they end with declarations of love and the decision to marry (or the marriage itself), when "what comes next" is really more interesting.
With the plot centered around the marital pivot point, the narrative will veer from strict romance to what I might call "family formation melodrama." The challenge, then, is to keep a firm grasp of the erotic thread and not turn into a dreary soap or one of those painfully unfunny sit-coms about what is in actuality an intolerably dysfunctional marriage.
Of course, we citizens of Utah County know that Mormons happily read (gentile) romance novels and attend R-rated movies at pretty much the same rates as the rest of suburban America. Whether such a genre with a "Mormon" label on the cover could survive that cognitive disconnect is another question.
Labels: books, BYU, lds, path notes, path of dreams, utah
August 31, 2007
Pelagius and the fools
We [Stephen Carter and Eugene Woodbury] propose that narrative fiction constructed in a Mormon context and for Mormon audiences often strays from conventional storytelling in several ways. Principal among these is the negation or diminution of the "second act." These stories skip from the first act (the set up) to the third act (the reassuring resolution), leaving out the struggle in between.
One explanation is that the hero's journey (as defined by the Campbellian monomyth) and the struggles he encounters present an unacceptable challenge to authority. Even the need for a journey suggests a rejection of the answers the gospel has provided. In other words, when the prophet speaks, the quest is over.
This missing "second act" also hints at a Calvinist mindset taking over Mormon letters: there is no need to wrestle with angels (as does Jacob in Genesis) or to protest bitterly to God (as does Job), because the proper resolution of our struggles has already been determined. Our fate is in the cards, and God always holds the winning hand.
The obvious exceptions are those Manichean contests in which a theologically-untroubled protagonist, in Hamlet's words, "takes up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing ends them." Hence the travails of the Willie and Martin handcart companies are depicted not as the product of human failure (which might problematically identify God as an unindicted co-conspirator), but as a heroic battle against cruel and insentient nature.
Coupled with the impulse to mollify an established set of authoritative truths is the growing rejection of what I call the "neo-Pelagian" theology that Joseph Smith restored, summed up in the proposition: "By grace we are saved, after all we can do." This challenge to "work out our own salvation" should be embraced, not as a challenge to divine providence, but as an invitation to play God's fools.
A 19th century transcendentalist who belongs alongside Emerson and Thoreau,(1) Joseph Smith resurrected the Puritan ideal of the "city on the hill,"(2) paralleling utopian movements such as Brook Farm. At the same time, he daringly attempted to mend the 16th century Catholic-Protestant rupture and bridge the long-buried 4th century Augustinian/Pelagian divide.
In doing so, Joseph Smith--quite inadvertently--created rich, new fields of possibility in Christian narrative fiction--fields that have shown particular promise in the science fiction and fantasy genres. But fields undermined by the loss of theological topsoil tilled from the revolutionary ideas of its founding prophet.(3)
Pelagius was a contemporary of Augustine and resided in Rome during the late 4th century. There he developed a theology of salvation that would be declared heresy two decades later at the Council of Carthage in 418.(4)
Instead Augustine's views of the Fall, original sin, and grace became official Christian orthodoxy. The opposing stances taken by Pelagius and Augustine do remain alive in Buddhism, in the debate over whether the Buddha himself is possessed of salvific power that can be accessed through faith, or whether he serves primarily as an exemplar to the penitent.(5)
Pelagius, in contrast, has all but disappeared from history.
But in the spring of 1820, he found an unlikely champion in the person of Joseph Smith, whose answer to both questions was: Yes. Smith went on to define a brazenly syncretic theology that would be received by the Christian community about as graciously as Pelagius's teachings were fourteen centuries before.
Joseph Smith's boldest step was to give every member of the human race a personal stake in his own creation and salvation. The most definite pronouncement of this doctrine was made in the King Follett sermon: "Intelligence is eternal and exists upon a self-existent principle. It is a spirit from age to age, and there is no creation about it."
Or as Shakespeare has King Henry lecture his soldiers: "Every subject's duty is the king's, but every subject's soul's his own."
Ask an informed Christian what disqualifies Mormonism from Christian fellowship and he will likely refer to the doctrine of eternal progression.(6) The leadership of the Mormon Church seems to have taken these criticisms to heart as well, resulting in contradictory public pronouncements on the subject.(7) Call it the revenge of the Augustinians.(8)
To be sure, Pelagius was an ascetic, out of the Stoic tradition, and Joseph Smith was not. "The great principle of happiness," he wrote, "consists in having a body. The devil has no body, and herein is his punishment."
Thus any doctrine he promulgated had to lock spirit and matter and grace and works together in an eternal whole, much in the same way that Grand Unified Theories in physics reach back to the first moments of creation, searching for the all-encompassing formula that reunites all observable physical phenomenon.
Expanding on John 3:16, Joseph Smith first posited 2 Nephi 25:23: "It is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do." This is the general theory. Eternal progression implies eternal struggle. The specific theory is found in Alma 12:24:
There is actually a third critical formula in Joseph Smith's Theory of Everything, that of salvation for the dead. This doctrine I consign to the field of eschatology. Still, I'll skip briefly to the eschatological beginnings. Joseph Smith, this time echoing John Milton,(9) observes: "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy" (2 Nephi 2:22-25).
Unfortunately, the problem with archetypes is that it's easy to remember the mythology and forget the original point. In the Biblical story God's greatest act is to permit Eve to be tempted, and then to act on that temptation, and then to live through the consequences. Joseph Smith portrays an upwards "Fall" in the evolution of the human race.
"This is good doctrine. It tastes good," he boasted, in the much the same way that mathematicians describe their theories as "elegant." In other words, here is the way the story should be told.
The story begins with a big bang, a fall from grace. An inciting incident, through which we enter a probationary state that tests our mettle. During this time, all forward progress is achieved through conflict. In the final resolution we reap the rewards of that behavior. The chickens come home to roost in proportion to the force with which they were sent flying.
Except that what I just summarized is not scripture or theology, but screenplay structure as explained by Robert McKee in his book Story.(10) According to McKee, the most important element of story structure is (and I paraphrase): the probationary state, and the necessity of opposition in all things. The narrative can only move forward through conflict, meaning hard choices. And hard choices ipso facto cause suffering (if they didn't, they wouldn't be hard). Grace--in the denouement--only comes after all we can do.
As children's literature critic Jenny Sawyer notes, "It's the hero's struggle--and costly redemption--that matters."(11) Or as my sister Katherine sums up in her review of Spider-Man 3: "The audience is willing to let the hero suffer." She cites Edmund from C.S. Lewis's Narnia books as an example, explaining why he is not a victim or a poor little boy, but the favorite character of many readers:
Which is why the attitude, "Well, he learned his lesson. He's sorry. Hey, you know, bad things happened to him too, so let's just let the whole thing drop," just doesn't work in terms of good storytelling.
As I noted earlier, Mormon authors have proved quite successful in the science fiction and fantasy genres. Not only because Mormon theology supplies the material and primes the creative pumps, but because the genre provides that degree of aesthetic distance that keeps those worrisome struggles from cutting too close to the bone.
Story evolves out of a "what-ifs" leading to conflict that must be resolved by the protagonist. And while man vs. nature and man vs. "the other" are standard sources of dramatic conflict, they don't well serve stories that evolve out of contemporary, suburban lives without degrading into utopianism (i.e., "we were a perfect little family until you came along").
This is the Mormon version of what Moira Redmond calls "Dreadlit," or young adult literature full of "utterly unmemorable, dreary, pointed tales in which girls and boys learn their lessons--actual and moral--in the most punishing ways possible."(13)
This is not a problem confined to Mormon letters. "What is wrong with the modern literary novel?" asks Julian Gough in May 2007 issue of Prospect Magazine.(14) "Why is it so worthy and dull? Why is it so anxious? Why is it so bloody boring?" The reason, he argues, is that "western culture since the Middle Ages has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic."
Which wouldn't by itself be such a bad thing, except that most "serious" fiction "contains not so much tragedy as mere anxiety. Pushed to look for tragedy in lives that contain none," Gough observers, "to generate suffering in order to be proper writers, they force themselves to frown rather than smile."
Lost in this perpetual winter of discontent is a sense of humor about human fallibility. And here Gough unwittingly draws a line straight to Joseph Smith. Hearkening back to the ancient Greeks, he notes that while tragedy was the "merely human" view of life,
I find this perspective highly amenable to a Mormon theology that posits a God possessed of human empathy, a God with a rich sense of been-there, done-that sensibility and humor. But we've been seduced by the same temptation. Concludes Gough, "If the subject is big, difficult and serious, the writer tends to believe the treatment must be in the tragic mode."
To be sure, as Robert McKee observes in Story, laughter is not an emotion. Rather, laughter is a reaction to incongruity. A tragic fact is a settled fact; humor is up in the air. The human comedy is a Hail Mary pass thrown into the end zone. A religious philosophy that acknowledges only settled facts on the ground can never be funny. Or compellingly dramatic.
The Bible is full of wry and bawdy humor. But we've been programmed to ignore and misinterpret it. In The Humor of Christ, Elton Trueblood notes that
Though his actions, in fact, Christ lived the life that Gough wishes to reclaim for the novel. The novel, insists Gough,
But this is tricky business, he admits. Humor with teeth--humor that engenders struggle--got Rabelais, Voltaire, and Cervantes (and Salman Rushdie) in trouble with the church and the law. And yet popular literature also suggests a way around this paradox. In a recent analysis on what she calls "bad-tempered doctors with hearts of gold"--Cox (from Scrubs), Becker (from Becker) and House (from House)--my sister concludes:
As it says in Moses 6:38, "There is a strange thing in the land; a wild man hath come among us." A deep and abiding longing for such "wild men"--mouthing off, telling tales out of school, tweaking God's nose--can be detected in the wistful longing with which Mormons share J. Golden Kimball stories, knowing that his kind will never come again.
Or to paraphrase Gough, the Mormon novel "needs the barbarians. It secretly yearns for them." Because without them, the audience is unlikely to stay through the second act, and so will not grasp that illustrative moral that the author so desperately wishes to elucidate in the stunning climax and the reassuring conclusion to the story.
This essay was the second of two papers presented with Stephen Carter at the 2007 Salt Lake City Sunstone Symposium and later at the 2007 AML Writing Conference. It is based in part on "To the contrary."
1. What Richard Bushman terms "19th century radical Mormonism . . . willing to challenge virtually everything in American culture." Transcript of the Pew Forum Biannual Faith Angle Conference on Religion, Politics and Public Life, May 2007. [return]
2. Ibid. "What is not recognized about Joseph Smith is that there is a very deep strain of what I am calling 'civic idealism' in him, by which I mean the construction of a new kind of urban society that would embody Christian principles more thoroughly." [return]
3. Ibid. "Mormons resisted high Calvinist theology in the 19th century. They were, like so many other groups, trying to differentiate themselves from the evangelical culture of the revivals, which basically came out of a Calvinist view of depravity. Mormons don't like the idea of depravity. So that led to an emphasis on works. You are capable of choosing the good, and God will recognize and reward choosing the good. In the late 20th century, that is reversed . . . . Right now, grace is getting more and more powerful among the Mormon teachers." [return]
4. "Pelagius and Pelagianism," The Catholic Encyclopedia. [return]
5. Eugene Woodbury, "Japan's Buddhist Protestant Reformation." [return]
6. Bushman, op cit. "Things [other than polygamy] are more likely to be scandalous to the theological order of the larger Christian community. For example: the ideas of God having a body of flesh and bone, existing in time and space rather than outside, and having once been a man like ourselves. That sort of business just drives other Christians up the wall." [return]
7. As Eugene England puts it [no reference], "There seems to be at present a bad case of loss of nerve, of preferring negative, safe religion to the positive, adventuresome kind championed by the founders of Mormonism."
In his 6/11/07 appearance on Radio West, Robert Millet put so much distance between the church and the principle of eternal progression that I was reminded of the famous scene from Tootsie. Asked how far he can pull back from a close-up of Tootsie (Dustin Hoffman in drag), the cameraman responds, "How about Cleveland?" Millet's explanation that the subject "never comes up" in his BYU classes suggests a theology beholding more to populism than to orthodoxy.
Millet's reticence is understandable (though he is on record teaching this very same subject), as he is simply echoing Gordon B. Hinckley. In the transcript from his 4 August 1997 Time Magazine interview, Hinckley said of Lorenzo Snow's famous couplet:
But in a 20 July 2007 interview with Helen Whitney published on the church's official website, Dallin Oaks prevaricates several orders of magnitude less:
8. Which is not to say that the average Mormon would accept this particular interpretation. For a discussion of the transition in Mormon theology away from Joseph Smith and towards a more mainstream (though rather half-hearted) Augustinian/Lutheran belief system, see Mormon Neo-Orthodoxy by O. Kendall White, Jr. (Signature Books, 1987). [return]
9. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 12: 473-476:
Compare Moses 5:11:
10. Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, Regan Books, 1997. [return]
11. Jenny Sawyer, "Missing from Harry Potter--a real moral struggle," The Christian Science Monitor, 25 July 2007. [return]
12. Katherine Woodbury, "Spider-Man, Angst, Redemption, and All That Good Stuff." [return]
13. Moira Redmond, "Tales of a Seventh-Grade Scare Tactic: The new Gothicism of children's books," Slate, 29 May 2002. [return]
14. Julian Gough, "Divine comedy," Prospect Magazine, May 2007. [return]
15. Elton Trueblood, The Humor of Christ, Harper & Row, 1975. [return]
16. Katherine Woodbury, "Cox, Becker & House." [return]
One explanation is that the hero's journey (as defined by the Campbellian monomyth) and the struggles he encounters present an unacceptable challenge to authority. Even the need for a journey suggests a rejection of the answers the gospel has provided. In other words, when the prophet speaks, the quest is over.
This missing "second act" also hints at a Calvinist mindset taking over Mormon letters: there is no need to wrestle with angels (as does Jacob in Genesis) or to protest bitterly to God (as does Job), because the proper resolution of our struggles has already been determined. Our fate is in the cards, and God always holds the winning hand.
The obvious exceptions are those Manichean contests in which a theologically-untroubled protagonist, in Hamlet's words, "takes up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing ends them." Hence the travails of the Willie and Martin handcart companies are depicted not as the product of human failure (which might problematically identify God as an unindicted co-conspirator), but as a heroic battle against cruel and insentient nature.
Coupled with the impulse to mollify an established set of authoritative truths is the growing rejection of what I call the "neo-Pelagian" theology that Joseph Smith restored, summed up in the proposition: "By grace we are saved, after all we can do." This challenge to "work out our own salvation" should be embraced, not as a challenge to divine providence, but as an invitation to play God's fools.
A 19th century transcendentalist who belongs alongside Emerson and Thoreau,(1) Joseph Smith resurrected the Puritan ideal of the "city on the hill,"(2) paralleling utopian movements such as Brook Farm. At the same time, he daringly attempted to mend the 16th century Catholic-Protestant rupture and bridge the long-buried 4th century Augustinian/Pelagian divide.
In doing so, Joseph Smith--quite inadvertently--created rich, new fields of possibility in Christian narrative fiction--fields that have shown particular promise in the science fiction and fantasy genres. But fields undermined by the loss of theological topsoil tilled from the revolutionary ideas of its founding prophet.(3)
Pelagius was a contemporary of Augustine and resided in Rome during the late 4th century. There he developed a theology of salvation that would be declared heresy two decades later at the Council of Carthage in 418.(4)
Instead Augustine's views of the Fall, original sin, and grace became official Christian orthodoxy. The opposing stances taken by Pelagius and Augustine do remain alive in Buddhism, in the debate over whether the Buddha himself is possessed of salvific power that can be accessed through faith, or whether he serves primarily as an exemplar to the penitent.(5)
Pelagius, in contrast, has all but disappeared from history.
But in the spring of 1820, he found an unlikely champion in the person of Joseph Smith, whose answer to both questions was: Yes. Smith went on to define a brazenly syncretic theology that would be received by the Christian community about as graciously as Pelagius's teachings were fourteen centuries before.
Joseph Smith's boldest step was to give every member of the human race a personal stake in his own creation and salvation. The most definite pronouncement of this doctrine was made in the King Follett sermon: "Intelligence is eternal and exists upon a self-existent principle. It is a spirit from age to age, and there is no creation about it."
Or as Shakespeare has King Henry lecture his soldiers: "Every subject's duty is the king's, but every subject's soul's his own."
Ask an informed Christian what disqualifies Mormonism from Christian fellowship and he will likely refer to the doctrine of eternal progression.(6) The leadership of the Mormon Church seems to have taken these criticisms to heart as well, resulting in contradictory public pronouncements on the subject.(7) Call it the revenge of the Augustinians.(8)
To be sure, Pelagius was an ascetic, out of the Stoic tradition, and Joseph Smith was not. "The great principle of happiness," he wrote, "consists in having a body. The devil has no body, and herein is his punishment."
Thus any doctrine he promulgated had to lock spirit and matter and grace and works together in an eternal whole, much in the same way that Grand Unified Theories in physics reach back to the first moments of creation, searching for the all-encompassing formula that reunites all observable physical phenomenon.
Expanding on John 3:16, Joseph Smith first posited 2 Nephi 25:23: "It is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do." This is the general theory. Eternal progression implies eternal struggle. The specific theory is found in Alma 12:24:
[N]evertheless there was a space granted unto man in which he might repent; therefore this life became a probationary state; a time to prepare to meet God; a time to prepare for that endless state which has been spoken of by us, which is after the resurrection of the dead.
There is actually a third critical formula in Joseph Smith's Theory of Everything, that of salvation for the dead. This doctrine I consign to the field of eschatology. Still, I'll skip briefly to the eschatological beginnings. Joseph Smith, this time echoing John Milton,(9) observes: "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy" (2 Nephi 2:22-25).
Unfortunately, the problem with archetypes is that it's easy to remember the mythology and forget the original point. In the Biblical story God's greatest act is to permit Eve to be tempted, and then to act on that temptation, and then to live through the consequences. Joseph Smith portrays an upwards "Fall" in the evolution of the human race.
"This is good doctrine. It tastes good," he boasted, in the much the same way that mathematicians describe their theories as "elegant." In other words, here is the way the story should be told.
The story begins with a big bang, a fall from grace. An inciting incident, through which we enter a probationary state that tests our mettle. During this time, all forward progress is achieved through conflict. In the final resolution we reap the rewards of that behavior. The chickens come home to roost in proportion to the force with which they were sent flying.
Except that what I just summarized is not scripture or theology, but screenplay structure as explained by Robert McKee in his book Story.(10) According to McKee, the most important element of story structure is (and I paraphrase): the probationary state, and the necessity of opposition in all things. The narrative can only move forward through conflict, meaning hard choices. And hard choices ipso facto cause suffering (if they didn't, they wouldn't be hard). Grace--in the denouement--only comes after all we can do.
As children's literature critic Jenny Sawyer notes, "It's the hero's struggle--and costly redemption--that matters."(11) Or as my sister Katherine sums up in her review of Spider-Man 3: "The audience is willing to let the hero suffer." She cites Edmund from C.S. Lewis's Narnia books as an example, explaining why he is not a victim or a poor little boy, but the favorite character of many readers:
Lewis understood what silly adults and the Spider-Man 3 screenwriters failed to grasp: that . . . in order to take someone seriously, you have to take their actions seriously, as well as the consequences of those actions. Lewis takes his children protagonists seriously, which must be very refreshing to the average child.(12)
Which is why the attitude, "Well, he learned his lesson. He's sorry. Hey, you know, bad things happened to him too, so let's just let the whole thing drop," just doesn't work in terms of good storytelling.
As I noted earlier, Mormon authors have proved quite successful in the science fiction and fantasy genres. Not only because Mormon theology supplies the material and primes the creative pumps, but because the genre provides that degree of aesthetic distance that keeps those worrisome struggles from cutting too close to the bone.
Story evolves out of a "what-ifs" leading to conflict that must be resolved by the protagonist. And while man vs. nature and man vs. "the other" are standard sources of dramatic conflict, they don't well serve stories that evolve out of contemporary, suburban lives without degrading into utopianism (i.e., "we were a perfect little family until you came along").
This is the Mormon version of what Moira Redmond calls "Dreadlit," or young adult literature full of "utterly unmemorable, dreary, pointed tales in which girls and boys learn their lessons--actual and moral--in the most punishing ways possible."(13)
This is not a problem confined to Mormon letters. "What is wrong with the modern literary novel?" asks Julian Gough in May 2007 issue of Prospect Magazine.(14) "Why is it so worthy and dull? Why is it so anxious? Why is it so bloody boring?" The reason, he argues, is that "western culture since the Middle Ages has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic."
Which wouldn't by itself be such a bad thing, except that most "serious" fiction "contains not so much tragedy as mere anxiety. Pushed to look for tragedy in lives that contain none," Gough observers, "to generate suffering in order to be proper writers, they force themselves to frown rather than smile."
Lost in this perpetual winter of discontent is a sense of humor about human fallibility. And here Gough unwittingly draws a line straight to Joseph Smith. Hearkening back to the ancient Greeks, he notes that while tragedy was the "merely human" view of life,
comedy was the gods' view, from on high: our endless and repetitive cycle of suffering, our horror of it, our inability to escape it . . . . And the best of the old Greek comedy tried to give us that relaxed, amused perspective on our flawed selves. We became as gods, laughing at our own follies. [emphasis added]
I find this perspective highly amenable to a Mormon theology that posits a God possessed of human empathy, a God with a rich sense of been-there, done-that sensibility and humor. But we've been seduced by the same temptation. Concludes Gough, "If the subject is big, difficult and serious, the writer tends to believe the treatment must be in the tragic mode."
To be sure, as Robert McKee observes in Story, laughter is not an emotion. Rather, laughter is a reaction to incongruity. A tragic fact is a settled fact; humor is up in the air. The human comedy is a Hail Mary pass thrown into the end zone. A religious philosophy that acknowledges only settled facts on the ground can never be funny. Or compellingly dramatic.
The Bible is full of wry and bawdy humor. But we've been programmed to ignore and misinterpret it. In The Humor of Christ, Elton Trueblood notes that
we habitually think of [Jesus] as mild in manner, endlessly patient, [and] grave in speech . . . [but] a prosy literalism misses the wry humor . . . and the point of the teaching.(15)
Though his actions, in fact, Christ lived the life that Gough wishes to reclaim for the novel. The novel, insists Gough,
cannot submit to authority. It is written against official language, against officialdom, and against whatever fixed form the novel has begun to take--it is always dying, and always being born.
But this is tricky business, he admits. Humor with teeth--humor that engenders struggle--got Rabelais, Voltaire, and Cervantes (and Salman Rushdie) in trouble with the church and the law. And yet popular literature also suggests a way around this paradox. In a recent analysis on what she calls "bad-tempered doctors with hearts of gold"--Cox (from Scrubs), Becker (from Becker) and House (from House)--my sister concludes:
What makes all three of the doctors interesting to watch is that all three of them act the role of "fool"--not a fool in the Ben Stiller sense--but a fool in the Shakespearean/King Lear sense. They say things other people don't admit or want to hear.(16)
As it says in Moses 6:38, "There is a strange thing in the land; a wild man hath come among us." A deep and abiding longing for such "wild men"--mouthing off, telling tales out of school, tweaking God's nose--can be detected in the wistful longing with which Mormons share J. Golden Kimball stories, knowing that his kind will never come again.
Or to paraphrase Gough, the Mormon novel "needs the barbarians. It secretly yearns for them." Because without them, the audience is unlikely to stay through the second act, and so will not grasp that illustrative moral that the author so desperately wishes to elucidate in the stunning climax and the reassuring conclusion to the story.
This essay was the second of two papers presented with Stephen Carter at the 2007 Salt Lake City Sunstone Symposium and later at the 2007 AML Writing Conference. It is based in part on "To the contrary."
1. What Richard Bushman terms "19th century radical Mormonism . . . willing to challenge virtually everything in American culture." Transcript of the Pew Forum Biannual Faith Angle Conference on Religion, Politics and Public Life, May 2007. [return]
2. Ibid. "What is not recognized about Joseph Smith is that there is a very deep strain of what I am calling 'civic idealism' in him, by which I mean the construction of a new kind of urban society that would embody Christian principles more thoroughly." [return]
3. Ibid. "Mormons resisted high Calvinist theology in the 19th century. They were, like so many other groups, trying to differentiate themselves from the evangelical culture of the revivals, which basically came out of a Calvinist view of depravity. Mormons don't like the idea of depravity. So that led to an emphasis on works. You are capable of choosing the good, and God will recognize and reward choosing the good. In the late 20th century, that is reversed . . . . Right now, grace is getting more and more powerful among the Mormon teachers." [return]
4. "Pelagius and Pelagianism," The Catholic Encyclopedia. [return]
5. Eugene Woodbury, "Japan's Buddhist Protestant Reformation." [return]
6. Bushman, op cit. "Things [other than polygamy] are more likely to be scandalous to the theological order of the larger Christian community. For example: the ideas of God having a body of flesh and bone, existing in time and space rather than outside, and having once been a man like ourselves. That sort of business just drives other Christians up the wall." [return]
7. As Eugene England puts it [no reference], "There seems to be at present a bad case of loss of nerve, of preferring negative, safe religion to the positive, adventuresome kind championed by the founders of Mormonism."
In his 6/11/07 appearance on Radio West, Robert Millet put so much distance between the church and the principle of eternal progression that I was reminded of the famous scene from Tootsie. Asked how far he can pull back from a close-up of Tootsie (Dustin Hoffman in drag), the cameraman responds, "How about Cleveland?" Millet's explanation that the subject "never comes up" in his BYU classes suggests a theology beholding more to populism than to orthodoxy.
Millet's reticence is understandable (though he is on record teaching this very same subject), as he is simply echoing Gordon B. Hinckley. In the transcript from his 4 August 1997 Time Magazine interview, Hinckley said of Lorenzo Snow's famous couplet:
I don't know that we teach it. I don't know that we emphasize it. I haven't heard it discussed for a long time in public discourse. I don't know. I don't know all the circumstances under which that statement was made. I understand the philosophical background behind it. But I don't know a lot about it and I don't know that others know a lot about it. [emphasis added].
But in a 20 July 2007 interview with Helen Whitney published on the church's official website, Dallin Oaks prevaricates several orders of magnitude less:
One of the succeeding prophets said: "As man is, God once was. And as God is, man may become." That is an extremely challenging idea. We don't understand, we're not able to understand, all [about] how it comes to pass or what is at its origin, but it explains the purpose of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. [emphasis added] [return]
8. Which is not to say that the average Mormon would accept this particular interpretation. For a discussion of the transition in Mormon theology away from Joseph Smith and towards a more mainstream (though rather half-hearted) Augustinian/Lutheran belief system, see Mormon Neo-Orthodoxy by O. Kendall White, Jr. (Signature Books, 1987). [return]
9. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 12: 473-476:
Full of doubt I stand,
Whether I should repent me now of sin
By me done and occasioned, or rejoice
Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring
Compare Moses 5:11:
Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient. [return]
10. Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, Regan Books, 1997. [return]
11. Jenny Sawyer, "Missing from Harry Potter--a real moral struggle," The Christian Science Monitor, 25 July 2007. [return]
12. Katherine Woodbury, "Spider-Man, Angst, Redemption, and All That Good Stuff." [return]
13. Moira Redmond, "Tales of a Seventh-Grade Scare Tactic: The new Gothicism of children's books," Slate, 29 May 2002. [return]
14. Julian Gough, "Divine comedy," Prospect Magazine, May 2007. [return]
15. Elton Trueblood, The Humor of Christ, Harper & Row, 1975. [return]
16. Katherine Woodbury, "Cox, Becker & House." [return]
Labels: buddhism, BYU, deep thoughts, lds, mckee, religion, thinking about writing