Self-Portrait as

Discovering Chu-bu and Sheemish

2011-11-15T00:39:59Z

I have a book-owning problem, a logical consequence of the book-buying problem I had for ages. The book-buying problem was especially bad when I was in grad school in Iowa City: not only did I have to buy books for school, for fun I would wander into Prairie Lights Bookstore on my way home and see if there was anything interesting on the remainder table (and there almost always was).

The book-buying problem is pretty much under control these days; I get stuff from the library and only buy things I a) must have for a project or b) know I'll like because it's by a writer I love. The book-owning, though still a problem, is not as bad as it used to be, because I've been reading stuff on my shelves and realizing that I don't need to own a lot of it any more.

Sometimes this is a cause of distress, as when FINALLY I read Franny and Zooey after owning it for almost three decades, and realized I HATED it: pretentious prose, annoying characters, and not that much actual story. I hauled that book back and forth across the continent more than once, when I should have just started it one night and put it in a box the next morning to take to a used bookstore.

]]> In fact, I'm amassing quite a stash of stuff to haul to a used bookstore one of these days. Which is not to say that everything I've pulled off my shelf has lost its place. I read something called The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman and really, really liked it. It's a keeper.

Sometimes I'll choose a book precisely because I think it's going to be something I'm content to get rid of after I read it. And a lot of times I'm right about that. But sometimes I'm really wrong.

Recently I picked up Gods, Men and Ghosts, a collection of supernatural tales by Lord Dunsany, off the shelf. I paid a buck for it over twenty years ago, couldn't remember why I bothered to spend even that much, and figured I'd read a few stories and consign it to the resale pile.

But I actually quite like it. The stories are pleasantly creepy, and the prose is excellent. And some of them say really interesting things, like this from the opening of "The Exiles Club":

It was an evening party; and something someone had said to me had started me talking about a subject that to me is full of fascination, the subject of old religions, forsaken gods. The truth (for all religions have some of it), the wisdom, the beauty, of the religions of countries to which I travel have not the same appeal for me; for one only notices in them their tyranny and intolerance and the abject servitude that they claim from thought; but when a dynasty has been dethroned in heaven and goes forgotten and outcast even among men, one's eyes no longer dazzled by its power find something very wistful in the faces of fallen gods suppliant to be remembered, something almost tearfully beautiful, like a long warm summer twilight fading gently away after some day memorable in the story of earthly wars. Between what Zeus, for instance, has been once and the half-remembered tale he is today there lies a space so great that there is no change of fortune known to man whereby we may measure the height down which he has fallen. And it is the same with many another god at whom once the ages trembled and the twentieth century treats as an old wives' tale. The fortitude that such a fall demands is surely more than human.

The story that has truly delighted me, though, is called "Chu-bu and Sheemish," about a small wooden idol who is enraged when his priests bring another idol into his temple. It's very short, very fun, and anyone who has ceased to worship a god others still trust and revere needs to read it. The tale of two jealous idols each overjoyed when the other ends up with bird shit on his head will make you laugh, I am pretty sure.

Clothes Line

2011-10-30T15:32:17Z

Yesterday a friend posted this video

on her Facebook page along with this statement from David Bowie:

It's not as truly hostile about Americans as say "Born in the U.S.A.": it's merely sardonic. I was traveling in Java when [its] first McDonald's went up: it was like, "for fuck's sake." The invasion by any homogenised culture is so depressing, the erection of another Disney World in, say, Umbria, Italy, more so. It strangles the indigenous culture and narrows expression of life.

In the first comment, she added, "Holly, I can't hear any DB without thinking of you."

This of course made me very happy. If someone is going to hear an artist and always think of you, well, it might as well be Bowie.

]]> One day not too long ago "I'm Afraid of Americans" came up on my ipod when the manager of my apartment building was doing some work in my place. He listened for a moment, then said, "This is one song I never expected to hear in your apartment."

"'Cause you didn't think I'd be a fan of Trent Reznor or 'cause you didn't think I'd be a Bowie fan?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Both, actually."

"I admit I'm a much bigger Bowie fan," I said, "but I've owned the first Nine Inch Nails album for twenty years. I have a Ministry album or two as well."

"Huh," he said. "You just don't look like you'd be a fan."

It was my turn to shrug. "At some point, you stop bothering to dress in a way that reflects your taste in music."

Same thing came up in class last week. I sometimes play music when I'm asking my students to get into small groups and talk about stuff--the music makes them less self-conscious, and they talk more freely. I typically go to Pandora and set it to "Depeche Mode radio," because even Mormons like "Personal Jesus." On Tuesday, while "The Love Cats" played, some kid said something about "Kevin Smith of the Cure."

"Kevin Smith?" I asked. "You mean Robert Smith. Kevin Smith's that indie film maker dude."

"Yeah, Robert Smith," he said. "I meant Robert Smith." He paused, then asked, "What clique were you in in high school?"

"My high school was too small to have cliques," I said. (It really pretty much was.)

"The reason I ask is 'cause this is exactly the music my mom likes. So I wondered what you listened to in high school."

"This is the music I listened to in college," I said. "Depeche Mode didn't exist when I was in high school. In high school I listened to what is now classic rock: Beatles, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, the Stones." (I didn't tell him that I also owned albums by REO Speedwagon and Lynyrd Skynyrd, because I didn't want him to know, or albums by Alan Parsons Project, the Moody Blues, and Jethro Tull, because I suspected he might not know who they are.)

"You just don't look like the type," he said.

"What type do I look like?" I asked.

"Honestly, I thought you were a hippie," he said.

Again I shrugged. "You should have seen me in 1988," I said.

In fact, on Friday a friend came by for coffee and as it was the first time she'd been to my apartment, we looked at and discussed some of the stuff I display in my home to remind me who I am, or was. She picked up a picture of me in 1988, wearing a black trilby hat, black sunglasses, a black trench coat, black peg-leg pants, and black flats. She said, "Was that a Halloween costume?"

No," I said. "That was just how I dressed."

"You really wore a trench coat like that? And a hat?"

"It was Tucson," I said. "You could wear what you wanted after autumn. It's not like you were in danger of really being cold."

So for the record: I used to dress like a hipster, especially in grad school. Over-dressing almost every single day was one of the ways I motivated myself to get out of bed when I was dealing with the crushing despair I experienced as I transitioned out of the church. I tried not to wear the same thing twice in a single semester, and I was VERY aggressive about matching. I would never dream of wearing brown shoes with a black outfit--who does something so gauche? Actually I entirely disdained and avoided brown, the color of mud and dung. I didn't carry a backpack; instead, I carried a really big purse, and when I found one I really liked, I bought it in all four colors available: black, white, red, and blue.

In fact, my wardrobe was something people often commented on. Students would write thing in my end-of-semester evaluations like, "I loved seeing what outfit she would wear every day" or "She was my best-dressed instructor." My favorite professor once said to me, about that period, "You were always dressed very dramatically, and I kept waiting for you to show up to class wearing nothing but a clear shower curtain."

Also for the record, I did all this while wearing temple garments (aka magic Mormon underwear) under my clothes and multiple earrings in my ears. It's not really that much of a challenge to dress cool as a Mormon, no matter what the NY Times says.

Two Different Kinds of Prodigy

2011-08-25T04:24:29Z

"Prodigy" typically refers to someone of extraordinary talent or ability, especially a child. A fun fact I picked up somewhere in the last two decades is that it originally meant "an unnatural happening," and so referred to omens or things of prophetic significance--as well as to something so unnatural it's monstrous. I once found it listed as a synonym for "monster."

The videos below were both sent to me by a friend who like me is a poet interested in religion. The first one involves many meanings of prodigy.... The last one is much simper, and will help alleviate some of the horror you will no doubt experience as you watch the first.

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I can't say how much that video freaks me out. The difference between the kid sitting and smiling at the "Today" lady or yawning or playing with his shoelaces because he's bored, versus the kid when he's all worked up, dabbing at his sweat with his folded handkerchief, really disturbs me. And then, when he starts jumping and down and shrieking, "But the Lord is gonna do it. That means God has to do it, and then God is gonna do it, and then Jesus has to do do it, and then God is gonna do it," as if that was anything but nonsense, I almost believe I have seen the anti-christ.

Whereas this is just nice. Perhaps the kid's mom helped him with intonation and expression, but it's still a very nice presentation of a terrific poem.

Douchebags Who Use Anonymity to Avoid Consequences for their Statements Deserve to Be Outed

2011-08-13T02:48:05Z

So, there's this bio-statistician here in Utah named Richard C. Bennett Jr aka Rick Bennett who blogs as Mormon Heretic, an absolute misnomer since he's a doctrinaire protector of patriarchy and promoter of orthodoxy. Mormon Heretic doesn't like me. He insists on going to my sessions at Sunstone and then complaining about how I do stuff he doesn't approve of. He has gone to social networking sites to find images of and information about me, and posted it on his blog. I am responding in kind. I figure, turn about is fair play.

Mormon Heretic/ Rick Bennett feels free to say all sorts of nasty personal things because he's managed to stay very anonymous, but here's the thing: I know how to find stuff out. Having discovered his name in real life, I am posting it here. Because douchebags who use anonymity to avoid consequences for their actions deserve to be outed.

Please feel free to pass on to any and everyone who might care (an admittedly tiny population) that Mormon Heretic is Rick Bennett.

Mormon Aesthetics

2011-08-02T05:16:47Z

The Mormon dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass.

The Mormon dislike of metaphor is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in the glass.

That's something I figured out from thinking about The Book of Mormon musical, and it's also why art produced by Mormons for Mormons is such useless crap.

with thanks to Oscar Wilde and his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray.

MHP: About Faith

2011-07-30T15:56:37Z

I became a fan of Melissa Harris-Perry thanks to her appearances on the Rachel Maddow Show, but it never occurred to me to google her until she mentioned that her ancestors were Mormon polygamists, a fact that influenced but did not determine her ideas about a number of things, including faith. I think I would have been moved by her statement on faith posted below even without knowing that, but it certainly didn't hurt my response to be aware of that.

This is the kind of faith I want to have, btw.

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Mansplaining in Austen

2011-07-19T01:44:52Z

I was interested in this discussion of mansplaining on Exponent II. Of course there was a defender of patriarchy (what would patriarchy do without little ladies to stick up for it?) who said the term "mansplaining" was sexist and offensive. Kmillecam had a pretty great response to that:

I would argue that yes, mansplaining is a phenomenon that MEN do because of their privileged status. If a woman is condescending about an issue she is ignorant of, then it wouldn't be called mansplaining, it would be something else. Mansplaining describes when a privileged man feels entitled to tell women/feminists what to think about a feminist issue.

If it seems sexist and offensive, I would ask for you to get really clear about the definition first. And then explore WHY you find it offensive. Perhaps it is just a new idea that warrants contemplation.

Anyway, I read the discussion, including someone's suggestion that the term be replaced with the gender-neutral "jerksplaining," and then I washed dishes, and then I thought about how Jennifer Ehle, who played Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice, and Colin Firth, who played Darcy, and David Bamber, who played Mr. Collins, were all in The King's Speech. And then I thought about how Mr. Collins was a total mansplaining jackass--that's part of why he's so horrible, the fact that he thinks he knows everything and Elizabeth knows nothing--and then I wrote a comment, which I liked well enough that I'm posting it here too, in a somewhat expanded form.

***

If you want a really clear sense of what mansplaining is and why it's called mansplaining and not jerksplaining, read or watch the scene in Pride and Prejudice where Mr. Collins proposes to Elizabeth. A man telling a woman she doesn't really know what she's talking about--even when what she's talking about are her own feelings--is mansplaining. And he feels every right to do it because by and large, society supports his position, not hers. Privilege and custom are on his side. Furthermore, by and large society forces her to submit to him, not just intellectually but sexually, if he wants it--regardless of whether she does. Fathers like Mr. Bennet who refused to marry their daughters to creeps with money were all too rare.

Consider also Elizabeth's response to Collins:

]]> `I do assure you, Sir, that I have no pretension whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man. I would rather be paid the compliment of being believed sincere. I thank you again and again for the honour you have done me in your proposals, but to accept them is absolutely impossible. My feelings in every respect forbid it. Can I speak plainer? Do not consider me now as an elegant female intending to plague you, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart.

That's a good basis for what women typically say to mansplainers: "I would rather be paid the compliment of being believed sincere. Do not consider me now as a [insert unflattering adjective--almost any will do: shrill, angry, bitter, disappointed, stupid, ignorant, lying, etc] female intending to plague you, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart."

And Collins' response is standard too: "Just see what the people in charge have to say. They'll make you do as I want."

For that matter, read Darcy's first proposal to Elizabeth. Consider this bit, where he tells her why she rejected him, mansplaining about how it wasn't a bit wrong for him to stress how unworthy she is of him, how appropriate it was that he be revolted to realize he loved her:

"But perhaps,'' added he, stopping in his walk, and turning towards her, ``these offences might have been overlooked, had not your pride been hurt by my honest confession of the scruples that had long prevented my forming any serious design. These bitter accusations might have been suppressed, had I with greater policy concealed my struggles, and flattered you into the belief of my being impelled by unqualified, unalloyed inclination -- by reason, by reflection, by every thing. But disguise of every sort is my abhorrence. Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and just. Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?''

Mansplaining. From start to finish, it's mansplaining.

There you have two more reasons to love Austen: she shows us what mansplainers are, long before anyone came up with the term, and she turns a thorough mansplainer into a man worth loving.

Telling a Lie Long Enough

2011-07-18T22:06:59Z

First, watch this trailer for Tabloid, one of the weirdest Mormon stories you'll EVER encounter:

Did you catch the bit about how a woman can't rape a man because "a guy either wants to has sex, or he doesn't," where Joyce laughingly dismisses the idea of a woman raping a man, saying it's "like putting a marshmallow in a parking meter"?

Then read this bit about Ms. Joyce McKinney showing up at a screening of the film in SLC.

I wasn't there, but I wish I had been. When Joyce asked

"How many people in here think Joyce McKinney kidnapped and raped the 300-pound, 6-foot-5-inch Mormon missionary?" She counted five people who raised their hands, and then quipped, "You're Mormons, huh?"

I would have said, "I can't say for sure that you raped the guy, but I most definitely believe it's possible for a woman to rape a man. You're making a facile and inaccurate conflation of arousal with consent. One does not automatically signal the other. As all those ads for Viagra and Cialis help to demonstrate, impotence doesn't mean a man has no interest in sex. In the same way, the fact that a guy has an erection doesn't mean he wants to do anything with it."

Which is basically what I did say in my review of the film.

And I must also add that it's feminism that helped me be able to see and articulate the fact that "arousal does not equal consent"--for both men and women. One more way feminism helps to dispel darkness and provide real equality.

SR Sanders on "Breaking the Spell of Money"

2011-07-14T15:00:23Z

Think of someone you love. Then recall that if you were to reduce a human body to its elements--oxygen, carbon, phosphorus, copper, sulfur, potassium, magnesium, iodine, and so on--you would end up with a few dollars' worth of raw materials. But even with inflation, and allowing for the obesity epidemic, this person you cherish still would not fetch as much as ten dollars on the commodities market. A child would fetch less, roughly in proportion to body weight.

Such calculations seem absurd, of course, because none of us would consider dismantling a human being for any amount of money, least of all someone we love. Nor would we entertain the milder suggestion of lopping off someone's arm or leg and putting it up for sale, even if the limb belonged to our worst enemy. Our objection would not be overcome by the assurance that the person still has another arm, another leg, and seems to be getting along just fine. We'd be likely to say that it's not acceptable under any circumstances to treat a person as a commodity, worth so much per pound.

And yet this is how our economy treats every portion of the natural world--as a commodity for sale, subject to damage or destruction if enough money can be made from the transaction. Nothing in nature has been spared--not forests, grasslands, wetlands, mountains, rivers, oceans, atmosphere, nor any of the creatures that dwell therein. Nor have human beings been spared. Through its routine practices, this economy subjects people to shoddy products, unsafe working conditions, medical scams, poisoned air and water, propaganda dressed up as journalism, and countless other assaults, all in pursuit of profits.

Read the entire article: "Breaking the Spell of Money" by Scott Russell Sanders, Orion

The Best Scholarly Article You Might Ever Read

2011-07-07T13:59:50Z

Long about 1992, back when I actually read most of the print magazines I subscribed to, I came across an excerpt in Harper's of an essay printed in the Journal of Medical Ethics entitled "A proposal to classify happiness as a psychiatric disorder" by Richard P. Bentall of Liverpool University. I was so intrigued by the excerpt that when I went to Iowa, I schlepped my book bag over to the medical library, tracked down the relevant volume of the journal, photocopied the article, then read and highlighted it.

I still have my 18-year-old photo, and recently told a friend I'd make her a copy of her own. Today it occurred to me to see if it was available online. Turns out it is. Here's the abstract:

]]> It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains - that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant.

The piece is so deadpan that people insisted to me that it was absolutely serious, that there was nothing funny about it. But check this out:

Certain kinds of social behaviour have also been reported to accompany happiness, including a high frequency of recreational interpersonal contacts, and prosocial actions towards others identified as less happy (3). This latter observation may help to explain the persistence of happiness despite its debilitating consequences (to be described below): happy people seem to wish to force their condition on their unhappy companions and relatives.

and this:

Certainly, if television soap operas in any way reflect real life, happiness is a very rare phenomenon indeed in places as far apart as Manchester, the East End of London and Australia.

and then consider this passage, and think about its relationship to certain types of religious belief and behavior:

According to Radden (26), behaviour may be described as irrational if it is bizarre and socially unacceptable, reduces the individual's expected utilities, or is not grounded on good (ie logically consistent and acceptable) reasons; in the latter case, in particular, Radden believes that the behaviour should be the subject of psychiatric scrutiny. A similar view has been taken by Edwards (27) who claims that bona fide cases of psychiatric disorder are characterised by actions that fail to realise manifest goals, thinking that is illogical and replete with contradictions, beliefs that should be falsified by experience, the inability to give reasons for actions, unintelligible or nonsensical thinking, and a lack of impartiality and fairmindedness. (emphasis added)

and this is my favorite passage in the whole thing:

It has been shown that happy people, in comparison with people who are miserable or depressed, are impaired when retrieving negative events from long-term memory (29). Happy people have also been shown to exhibit various biases of judgement that prevent them from acquiring a realistic understanding of their physical and social environment. Thus, there is consistent evidence that happy people overestimate their control over environmental events (often to the point of perceiving completely random events as subject to their will), give unrealistically positive evaluations of their own achievements, believe that others share their unrealistic opinions about themselves, and show a general lack of evenhandedness when comparing themselves to others (30). Although the lack of these biases in depressed people has led many psychiatric researchers to focus their attention on what has come to be known as depressive realism it is the unrealism of happy people that is more noteworthy, and surely clear evidence that such people should be regarded as psychiatrically disordered.

Yes, it's long and dense. But it's insightful, funny and worth your time. Read it and liken it unto yourself, that it might be for your profit and learning.

Fictional Empathy

2011-07-05T13:43:03Z

Among the many reasons I hate Henry James is this sentence from The Ambassadors:

A perpetual pair of glasses astride of this fine ridge, and a line, unusually deep and drawn, the prolonged pen-stroke of time, accompanying the curve of the moustache from nostril to chin, did something to complete the facial furniture that an attentive observer would have seen catalogued, on the spot, in the vision of the other party to Strether's appointment.

I read that sentence in the first few pages of the book, tried to deflect the horror of the phrase "facial furniture," failed, closed the book, and vowed that I would read no more Henry James, ever.

But I also hate James for what he did to Isabel Archer, his favorite protagonist and heroine of Portrait of a Lady,. He created the most interesting, appealing character he could--and then tried to see just how much he could ruin her life.

Turns out he could ruin it a lot.

It pisses me off. I take the whole thing very personally. OK, she's only a real fictional character, not a real human being, But who does that? Who, besides God, tries to see just how miserable he can make his own offspring?

]]> One reason I have had trouble writing fiction is that I find it hard to make my characters suffer, or to make anyone a villain. I want for my characters what I want for everyone: to be basically good people whose lives, on the whole, turn out OK. But fiction requires conflict, so someone has to be an agent of conflict, or your fiction sucks. (I wanted to believe otherwise for a while, but unfortunately, it's true.)

There's a scene somewhere in Proust (I forget exactly where--it's been too long since I've read him) about a servant--a cook, maybe--who loves melodramatic novels. She'll cry and cry over the suffering of some character, and one character in particular has a nasty illness that the cook finds especially moving. Under her command is a lowly scullery maid who has this exact same illness. But the cook is not moved by the suffering of a real human being right in front of her. In fact, she gives the girl chores that make her illness worse. The girl's life is merely her life, not part of an artfully arranged story.

The basic ethos of most religions is "care about people who aren't you as much as you care about yourself (unless God gives you permission to exploit/enslave/rape/exterminate them, because they don't quite meet all the criteria for people)."

I'm not saying that I've never resembled Proust's cruel cook and increased the suffering of someone close to me because their "story" just didn't move me, or because I was part of their story and felt they were nasty people who had forfeited my goodwill through their nasty behavior to me. In fact, I know I've done exactly that.

But I am also surprised from time to time at how much I care about people who are not me, how upset I get about the suffering of someone I'll never meet or who died ages ago. It's like these lines from "Cemetery Gates" by the Smiths (fyi: to my horror, I found these lyrics on an oldies site. The Smiths! Oldies! Don't people realize there's a difference between oldies and classics?):

So we go inside and we gravely read the stones
All those people all those lives
Where are they now?
With the loves and hates
And passions just like mine
They were born
And then they lived and then they died
Seems so unfair
And I want to cry

I read and write memoir, and I especially like combat memoir. I find it very easy to be moved by tales of having someone try to kill you while you are cowering in the mud and whimpering in fear.

One of my favorite books is The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. I have given copies of this book as gifts for 15 years. (Coincidentally, I just lent my extra copy to someone. Hey! If you're reading this, I promise: you'll like this book.) I have taught it repeatedly in all sorts of classes. Students LOVE it--with good reason.

I too love it for all sorts of reasons, one being that it makes the point that a true war story is always a love story:

To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. Though it's odd, you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not....

And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

I cannot stop thinking of a story I heard recently, about a friend of a friend who was hurt enormously when religious strictures got in the way of what should have been a fairly easy and normal course of events. Everyone involved acted from what they thought were principled positions, but all sorts of unnecessary suffering nonetheless ensued.

I'll never meet this person, and despite an utterly avoidable mistake with far-reaching consequences, life has gone on. No one died in the mud.

But no one has really lived happily ever after, either, and the story illustrates quite clearly at least one huge difference between "how the world could be and always should be, but now is not." It's a perfect example of how people fuck things up, not through cruelty or malice but simply through ignorance, bigotry and a very deep fear of change and otherness.

And I really, really HATE that kind of story. I mean I really super-duper HATE it extra, with a heavy sauce of loathing and revulsion on top.

I really hope we stop creating versions of it before too terribly long.

Tres Trey

2011-06-21T01:39:14Z

Today I made a really dumb joke that I still really liked. I was talking about The Book of Mormon musical with an inactive returned missionary and South Park fan who hasn't even bothered to listen to the soundtrack. He asked me what it was like; I provided a few details; he said, "So it's pretty much Trey Parker."

I said, "It's tres Trey Parker."

I know. Really dumb. And sorta obvious. But the phrase doesn't show up in a google search.

I suppose you could say that the BOM musical is Trey outre as well.

I Didn't Just BELIEVE This Would Happen; I KNEW It

2011-06-13T14:23:09Z

The Book of Mormon won nine of the 14 Tonys it was nominated for--and of course it won the big one, best musical. Watch this, my favorite song from the show, and you should know why:

Put it on full screen and notice all the things they get right: for instance, the name tag is exactly right, the garment sleeves are too (though they don't get the neck right). And the hair! The bangs that could stand straight up but instead project straight out! Is that a BYU haircut or what? It was EVERYWHERE in 1988; these days it's most common in Provo. (Which is a shame, because I actually like that haircut.) But most of all, Andrew Rannells has the expressions and mannerisms of a 19-year-old Mormon boy who wants to believe--and, for a moment, believes he can.

ITTY BITTY SPOILER ALERT. DON'T READ THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW THE ONE ACTION IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THIS SONG. But if you do want to know, here it is: General Butt-fucking Naked and his men take that Book of Mormon Elder Price is clutching so lovingly, and they shove it up his ass. You see Elder Price in a hospital gown, crouched uncomfortably, while a giant x-ray shows the BOM firmly lodged in his colon. When he next appears on stage, he's limping and carrying a shit-covered BOM in a ziplock bag.

Genius, I tell you. Genius.

I'm bummed that Rannells didn't win best lead actor. Nor did Rory O'Malley win "best actor in a featured role" for his performance as Elder McKinley, the "openly closeted" district leader. Bu Nikki M. James won "best actress in a featured role" for her performance as Nabulungi.

And check out Trey Parker thanking co-writer Joseph Smith at the end of this clip:

Atheist Love Song

2011-06-08T15:58:20Z

This just came up on my itunes. It's probably my favorite New Order song, which is saying a lot.

It Arrived!

2011-05-26T01:21:48Z

Of course I knew that The Book of Mormon soundtrack was available to download last week, but the thing is, I wanted an actual cd with a case and liner notes, even if all that stuff did cost four whole extra dollars. (The same friend who likes to tease me about my quaint twentieth-century technology also thinks it's amusing that I buy books and CDs and keep them out where I can touch and look at and use them.) So when the album could be downloaded, I just went ahead and pre-ordered the cd, even though it wasn't going to be released until June 7. I knew I wanted it, so why wait?

Friday I got a notice that it had shipped. I thought, that's odd, since it won't be released for two and a half more weeks.

But look what I got in the mail today!

It's so lovely! The insert has all the lyrics and lots of pretty pictures.

There's a photo of Elder Price with blood all over his shirt after General Butt-Fucking Naked shoots a guy in the face at close range for daring to assert that the general had no business insisting that all the women in the village be circumcised. There's a picture of white guys dressed entirely in white singing "I Am Africa." There's a picture of Nabulungi, enraptured by hope, singing "Sal Tlay Ka Citi." There are lots of photos of smiling missionaries.

And the songs just sound so much better than they do played on Youtube, which is how I've been listening to them lately. :-)

Plus it arrived just in time for a road trip I'm taking tomorrow, with a friend who has yet to hear the entire soundtrack, so life is good.