August 2006 Archives

Classes start Tuesday. Yesterday I turned in my syllabi to be copied, so as far as clerical preparations for the first day are concerned, I'm good to go. I've also figured what I'm going to discuss the first day (I've been here too long and have too many repeat students to just read the syllabus for the first 75-minute period) and acquired any necessary materials. I have no clue what's going to happen on Thursday, the second day I teach, but at least the first day is accounted for.

Thought you'd want to know.

I recently discovered something amazing: It is possible to play solitaire without a computer! Just get a regular old deck of cards--the kind you use to play poker or some such game--and replicate on a table or some other flat surface the layout of your favorite version of computer solitaire. The rules and so forth are the same, except that you must shuffle and move the cards about yourself.

I think part of me always knew this--now that I plumb my memory, I can recall a time in the 1970s, back before VCRs were commonplace; back when there were only three networks, all of which showed reruns in the summer, so that there might be nothing to watch on television, necessitating other ways of amusing oneself after the sun went down (which it does around 8 p.m. in mid June in Arizona, a state that resolutely refuses to observe Daylight Saving Time); back when my mother would try to get my sisters and me to entertain ourselves quietly from time to time and so taught us all to play every version of solitaire she knew of and bought us each our own deck of cards. (Which was kind of a big deal because there was this whole weird to-do in Mormondom in the 1970s and 80s about how "face cards were Satanic." Rook cards were fine; Uno cards were fine; Gin Rummy played with Rook cards was fine and Go Fish! played with Uno cards was fine; but play those same games with a deck of face cards and you were practically ringing the doorbell of hell, because cards bearing stylized representations of European royalty were the devilish creation of Lucifer himself, and the sin in such cards was so potent it would rub off on your fingers if you even picked up a deck.)

But seriously, when I recently came across a deck of cards and thought, "Huh. I so rarely run into anyone who enjoys playing cards any more; what am I ever going to do with these?" it felt like a discovery to realize that I really truly could, all by myself, play a game of cards that wasn't virtual, that the object itself was every bit as good as the electronic replacement.

Every so often, people will post lists of the search queries that brought readers to their blogs. I'm finally following suit. I picked this particular list because it contains a few searches I might conduct myself (I've googled the Salt Lake Tribune a time or two, though I know my chances of finding the paper's home site instead of some reference to the paper are increased if I type in its full name) and the others are only sort of upsetting, instead of really, really gross. I'm offering it without comment because really, what is there to say?

pretty russian girls bikinis panties bra
self portraiture
drunken one night stand forgivable?
behold here is my daughter
self photo vagina
literary devices on keeping a notebook by didion
sl tribune
writing really good letter praise
mormon taboos coke coffee
my tits
tattoo in genital organ
men in britain emasculation
stuffed mormon pussy
when the beard is too painful to remove

Yesterday I went to Best Buy and bought Season II of Veronica Mars, just as I said I would, and watched about as much as I could stand before my eyeballs started to itch. One thing I'm fascinated by is what a big deal Kristen Bell's small tits are this season.

Not a lot was made of the topic the first season, though one of my very favorite exchanges referenced the subject: Veronica has discovered that someone has let the air out of one of her tires. New guy and love interest "boy toy Troy" (as he is referred to by Logan Echolls) squats beside her as she struggles with lug nuts and asks, "Flat?"

Yeah, I'm back.

I got home Wednesday night. The journey home was, as they say about acid from time to time, a bad trip. Flight patterns were screwed up at the Salt Lake airport for some reason no one ever bothered explaining to me so although we boarded on time and shut the door on time and pulled away from the gate on time, we then sat on the tarmac for 55 minutes (the captain specified that it was 55 minutes) waiting for our turn to take off, waiting and waiting and then waiting some more as if waiting were a perfectly normal thing to do in an airplane. Fortunately I have a gift, a very fortunate gift indeed, and even a strange one, in light of the fact that in a bed I am prone to insomnia, and my gift is this: I always fall asleep on planes. I am so disposed to falling asleep on planes that I get sleepy just waiting to board one. So I slept while we waited for our plane to take off, even though I had slept a lot the night before and it was only ten a.m., too early really to be sleepy.

Yesterday I explained why I go to Sunstone; here's something I posted last year about why it's hard to attend, and how I always feel weird in Utah.

Today is my first day at Sunstone. Several people have asked me recently why I go to Sunstone, especially given my relationship to the church. Since I've already written something that addresses that question, I'm posting it here. This essay was published last year in Sunstone's print journal. It's kind of long, but if you're interested, here it is.

"What are you doing at Sunstone, then?"

It's a question I am asked each year. Sometimes the question is posed with genuine curiosity; sometimes it's an accusation. Why would someone who isn't a practicing or believing Mormon attend a symposium on Mormonism? It's also a question I asked at one point. Although I had read, subscribed to, published in, cited in my own scholarship and learned from the print version of SUNSTONE for years, I never attended a symposium until 2001--and the decision finally to do so wasn't easy. Early in 2001 I submitted an essay for publication; a few months later I got a message from Dan Wotherspoon, letting me know that he'd accepted the essay, and requesting that I read a version of it at the symposium. I told him I'd think about it.

"Why would I want to go to that?" I asked myself. "It's all fine and good in print, where you can read what intrigues you and ignore what doesn't, and nobody interrupts the author in the middle of a point. But this live version...I'm sure it'll just be a bunch of disgruntled inactives arguing about stuff with a bunch of bossy hard-liners"--and I'd seen and participated in enough of that already. But Dan was graciously, persistently insistent that I'd enjoy the symposium, so I queried a few friends who had attended.

"Of course you should go," they told me. "For every panel that doesn't interest you, you'll find one that does. And you'll meet so many incredibly cool people."

So I went. And Dan and my friends were right--so right, in fact, that I've been back every year since, and plan to go again. But what is it that draws me?

As I mentioned yesterday, today is the first anniversary of my blog. Instead of posting some long new entry, I thought I'd suggest you check out my very first entry, which explains why I named my blog Self-Portrait As.

I'm leaving for Sunstone in a few hours, but while I'm gone this time, I'm not turning the comments off, because Jim my host has fixed me up with a nifty new security function to keep spammers at bay. However, a couple of people have had problems posting when they try to preview their comments-- there's a glitch somewhere and once you preview the comment you can't post it. You have to highlight and save your comment, then hit refresh, then paste your comment into the new window, then hit post without hitting preview. Sorry for the problem....

Anyway, you can comment while I'm gone (and I do have some posts lined up to publish with the "scheduled" function) but it might be a while before I approve them. And I won't be around to comment on your blogs for a while, but I'll catch up when I'm back.

Thanks!

When we were little and would say, on our birthdays, "I'm nine years old today!" or whatever age was appropriate, my father would say, "No, you were nine years old yesterday. Yesterday you finished your ninth year. Today you're nine years and one day."

I started blogging on August 9, 2005, which means that today is the 365th day of my blog's existence, which I guess makes it one year old today. But tomorrow is still its birthday--or rather, the anniversary of its birthday. You really only have one birthday. That's something else my father would say.

He wasn't a killjoy, really--well, OK, he was kind of a killjoy. He just likes fussy distinctions.

And it's not like the Western way is the only way of counting birthdays. In Chinese culture, you're age one the day you're born. On the first anniversary of your birth, you're two. Your age is the cycle of year you're in, whereas in our system, your age is one less than the cycle you're in. In 1986, when I was a missionary, I thought of myself as 22, but if a Chinese person asked my age, I said 23.

Anyway, my blog has a birthday anniversary coming up, and this is our 251st entry. If you get a chance, we'd appreciate some congratulations.

Something I do for fun and self-affirmation is check books out of my university library system, then leave them to languish in my office book case. If I don't start the book within a week of checking it out, I almost never get around to reading it. But as a faculty member, I can keep a book out for, like, the duration of my employment here, as long as no one else wants it, and it comforts me to look at all those books from the library, know that I haven't spent a cent to have access to them, and imagine that I might read them, some day.

I just got an email telling me that I needed to renew my stash of books--I had 34 out. Here are some of the titles:

I promise, one of these days, I really will write about something else. But I keep running into more discussions of this topic, which I feel compelled to share.

Perhaps in reply to Thursday's NY Times article about gay men in straight marriages (which I discussed yesterday), Friday the Salt Lake Tribune published an article about "mixed orientation" marriages, with the optimistic headline, "Mixed-orientation LDS couples count on commitment, work and love to beat the odds." The article's basic message is this: gay men, just admit you're gay before you get married, convince yourself that sex doesn't matter all that much, and you too can have a conventional Mormon marriage!

Women, just accept that your husband is gay and will never want you the way he wants men, convince yourself that sex doesn't matter all that much, and you too can have a conventional Mormon marriage!

The couple interviewed for the article are sure of this because they are in the early 20s and have small children, and by gosh and by golly, they're making it work! What's fifty years of denial compared to getting through the first five years of a marriage?

The article acknowledges that most such marriages fail. Still, it discusses the phenomenon in such admiring tones--aren't these kids brave! Aren't they honest and open to challenges!

Let's hope they convince even more gay men to marry straight women, so that others can engage in the same (probably) doomed struggle!

I said we'd abandon this topic for a while, and when I said that, I meant it. But two things--or rather, two comments that need attention called to them--happened on the Brokeback Mountain post: 1) Saviour Onassis offered me a proposal of no marriage--check it out! It was so sweet; and 2) Spike provided a link to a timely article from the NY Times. Entitled "When the Beard Is Too Painful to Remove," it is, as Spike notes, "remarkably sympathetic to the gay men who struggle to figure out how to remain in their marriages and families. But not a word on lesbians who might find themselves in a marriage with a man but needing or craving partnerships with women, and not much comment on how the wives-- ‘beards'--the terms is gendered and sounds so derogatory--are supposed to cope."

The article states that

For gay men in heterosexual marriages, even after the status quo becomes unbearable, the pull of domestic life remains powerful. Many are desperate to preserve their marriages-- to continue reaping the emotional and financial support of wives, (emphasis added) and domestic pleasures like tucking children in at night.

And how do such men hope to retain those benefits? The articles cites Stephen McFadden, a social worker who runs support groups for married gay men in Manhattan, in asserting that "these men want to save their marriages.... either by lying, promising their wives they will not have sex with men or persuading them to accept their double lives."

In fact,

Leaving a marriage and setting up housekeeping with a gay partner is not what most married gay men have in mind when they join a support group, according to Stephen McFadden.... Instead, Mr. McFadden and others in the field say, their clients generally start out committed to the opposite goal.

That's insane to me--about like joining a support group for alcoholics and expecting to be told how keep people off your back or bolster your liver function so you can continue drinking, or joining a support group for compulsive gamblers because you want information on how to borrow more money when your credit is already shot and your house is in foreclosure.

The only woman quoted is "Bonnie Kaye, the former wife of a gay man, who runs the Web site www.gayhusbands.com and conducts ‘How to Come Out to Your Wife' workshops. ‘If they're too selfish to leave, I won't work with them,' Ms. Kaye said. ‘If they love their wives, they need to give them their lives back.'"

I'm glad the article let someone say it.

Thanks again, Spike, for providing the link.

In the comments to yesterday's post on Brokeback Mountain, CL Hanson notes that she learned at BYU that "in [Mormon] culture woman is the disposable person." That's something learned in college myself, albeit in a bible lit class, when I read this gruesome story in Judges 19, which I'm going to tell now, and then we're going to take a break from this topic, since it doesn't seem wildly popular. [OK, I lied: there's a followup here.] Plus, I'm almost done with the paper and will have time to write about something else for a while. But here it is, without further ado, one of the grossest stories from the Old Testament:

In Judges 19, we get the story of a Levite from Mount Ephriam whose concubine leaves him in order to return to her parents' house, an activity labeled "playing the whore against him," or valuing her own desires above his. The Levite eventually goes to fetch his concubine, and on their journey home they stop in Gibeah, where the men are "Benjaminites," meaning both that they are of the tribe of Benjamin and that they have sex with other men. The Levite sets up camp in the street of a city, only to be implored by an old man not to lodge there--instead, the old man offers the couple shelter for the night.

Beginning in verse 22, we read

Now as they were making their hearts merry, behold, the men of the city, certain sons of Belial, beset the house round about, and beat at the door, and spake to the master of the house, the old man, saying, Bring forth the man that came into thine house, that we may know him. [Note: in case you don't get it, they're using "know" in the biblical sense, this being the bible and all.]

[23] And the man, the master of the house, went out unto them, Nay, my brethren, nay, I pray you, do not so wickedly; seeing that this man is come into mine house, do not this folly.

[24] Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you: but unto this man do not so vile a thing.

Here's a follow-up to yesterday's post, more on what I want to discuss at Sunstone this year. This is a topic I've already explored on my blog, in entries entitled Mormon Social Taboos, A Happy Marriage with a Good Man, and The Exclusive Terroritory of Straight Men.

It ain't gonna be pretty, that's for sure.

Over Christmas I went to see Brokeback Mountain with Saviour Onassis while we were both in Arizona for the holidays. I was staying with my sister, who is both a dutiful Mormon who avoids R-rated movies, and a devoted and knowledgeable fan of good cinema. She knew she wouldn't be seeing the movie, but she wanted to hear all about it when I got home. "Is it really as good as they say?" she asked.

"It really is," I said. "Heath Ledger is amazing. He deserves an Oscar." (He was robbed, by the way. So was Jake.) "He reminded me of some of our cousins," I told her. "He does a thoroughly convincing job of playing a taciturn western cowboy."

"I hear both characters have wives," she said.

The entry below is part of my attempt to shape material for a panel I'm moderating/presenting on at Sunstone next week. The title of the panel is "Will, Grace, and Angels in Brokeback America: Straight Women, Gay Men, and Mormonism." I can already tell I will have too much to say--I always do--and am worrying about how to cover what's most important. I will be grateful for any suggestions on how to deal with this material.

"The society of buggers has many advantages--if you are a woman," declares Virginia Woolf in her memoir "Old Bloomsbury."

It is simple, it is honest, it makes one feel, as I noted, in some respects at one's ease. But it has this drawback--with buggers one cannot, as nurses say, show off. Something is always suppressed, held down. Yet this showing off, which is not copulating, necessarily, nor altogether being in love, is one of the great delights, one of the chief necessities of life. Only then does all effort cease; one ceases to be honest, one ceases to be clever. One fizzes up into some absurd delightful effervescence of soda water or champagne through which one sees the world tinged with all the colours of the rainbow. It is significant of what I had come to desire that I went straight--on almost the next page of my diary indeed--from the dim and discreet rooms of James Strachey [one of her brother's gay classmates] at Cambridge to dine with Lady Ottoline Morrel at Bedford Square. Her rooms, I noted without drawing any inferences, seemed to me instantly full of "lustre and illusion."

Woolf arrives at this conclusion after trying to puzzle out why certain of her brother Thoby's university classmates, who would visit the home she kept with Thoby and their sister Vanessa, were simultaneously brilliant and boring, gifted and barren, why certain "young men [made] one feel that one could not honestly be anything? The answer to all my questions was, obviously--as you will have guessed--that there was no physical attraction between us."