From: owner-aml-list-digest@lists.xmission.com (aml-list-digest) To: aml-list-digest@lists.xmission.com Subject: aml-list-digest V1 #588 Reply-To: aml-list Sender: owner-aml-list-digest@lists.xmission.com Errors-To: owner-aml-list-digest@lists.xmission.com Precedence: bulk aml-list-digest Friday, January 25 2002 Volume 01 : Number 588 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 22:15:15 -0700 From: Melissa Proffitt Subject: Re: [AML] Public and Private Mormon Lit On Mon, 21 Jan 2002 19:43:24 -0500, Tracie Laulusa wrote: >I don't think I'm getting your definition of public vs private. Could = you >start over and explain it to me? Well, I think so, but it's really Richard's definition that I'm running = off with, so what do I know? :) As I understand what he was getting at, Richard posited that there were = two kinds of LDS lit, public and private. By "public LDS lit" he (and I as = far as this discussion goes) means stories in which the characters' religious behavior is central to the story, even if the story is really about something else. Characters behave perfectly in accordance with an ideal about how Mormons ought to behave. In "private LDS lit" the idea is that unless the story itself touches on religion, you might have a character who's LDS and you would never know it. >I think I understand what you are saying about RN's book. If she were >writing for the national market, intending to be read by non-mormons, = her >books would sound preachy because they assume knowledge of (and = agreement >with ?) the culture and doctrine. Since she's not writing for a = national >market, but strictly LDS this isn't really an issue with her books. That's exactly what I think. The difference is in the assumed audience. > I'm not >sure exactly what you mean by 'public LDS'. What would make it private = LDS? In his initial post, Richard referred to Nunes's book _Love to the = Highest Bidder_. (I happen to have this book right here because, after = discovering that there weren't any reviews of her books in the archives, I thought I should probably do something about that.) The main characters of this = book, Jared and Cassi, are rival art buyers for prestigious galleries. They = meet when they are both bidding on a big piece and don't like each other at = all. Then they discover they're both LDS, and THEN it turns out that the piece they've been fighting over is wanted by a lot of very unscrupulous = people. The bulk of the story has them hiding out, on the run from people who = want to kill them, and eventually they fall in love. Richard's reaction (I think; correct me if I'm wrong) is that this story, being a basic action novel, didn't really need the Mormon element. = Private LDS literature has characters who are LDS, but whose religion doesn't = take center stage. For example, in this novel, there's a long scene that = takes place in a hospital which basically only exists so that Jared and Cassi = can find out they're both Mormons; Jared is called in to give a blessing to a sister in the hospital, and Cassi's friend is having a baby. If this = were "private" fiction, the scene wouldn't exist, and Jared and Cassi might go the entire novel not realizing they're both Mormon. Because it's = "public" fiction, the scene's there because it's perfectly in character for a = Mormon guy to be called on to give blessings to ward members, and Mormon readers know this. What's more, readers of public LDS fiction *want* to have the religious aspect out in the open. >In reading your responses I thought of Chiam Potok.=20 I think Chaim Potok is the ideal example for Mormons who want to write = about our religion and culture for non-Mormons. But I'm biased because I love = his books. >I never felt that his >books were preachy. But perhaps that is because, at least in my >recollection, every one of his main characters had questions and issues = with >the Jewish religion and culture. Since they had questions there was no >feeling that the reader should be in total agreement with anything. = Does >that sound right? I think that's what makes it work in his case. I don't know if it's = always necessary to have characters who question their faith and culture to make= it accessible to others. In another list I'm on, we had a discussion about = a particular science fiction author that many of us thought wrote very = preachy books. Her strong opinions about right and wrong are always expressed in her fiction, almost to the point of caricature; the evil characters have "wrong" opinions and the good characters have "right" opinions. There's never any possibility that good people might believe differently than the author does. This feels very...preachy to me. It makes me want to have arguments with the author and her characters. I think what it takes--and this is a very fumbling-in-the-dark answer--is a clear distinction = between the expressed beliefs and opinions of the characters and the implied = opinion of the author. It's a nebulous thing; I never can explain how I know whether it's the author talking or the characters, but I always do, and = if I feel that the author is using her characters simply to promote her own belief, I'm turned off. One of the other things that I think makes Potok's novels work is that = all the Jews in his books disagree with one another about their own faith, in addition to having personal issues. It makes the religion seem less monolithic. If, for example, there are at least two Jewish communities = in _The Chosen_, there's the possibility that either or both (or neither) = could be right about the doctrine. And if they can't agree, then surely I = don't have to. Rachel Nunes's books aren't stark black-and-white in the way the abovementioned SF writer's are. There are many good characters who don't believe in the gospel. However, because the underlying premise is that = the gospel is true and the best course of action is to join the Church, the = good non-member characters usually progress toward taking the discussions, reactivating, or at least quitting their sinful ways. Everybody's constantly moving toward the model of the ideal Mormon, step by step. = For readers whose ideal is different, this is preachy because it says = implicitly that *their* ideal is the wrong one, and it promotes a different ideal that's the right one. I think, if you were writing for a national audience, you could depict faithful Mormon characters without implying that non-Mormons are lacking = in some way. In reading Potok's novels, I feel as though I understand the Jewish culture he depicts, without the sense that if I don't convert to Judaism, I'm wrong. I see no reason why we couldn't do the same for Mormonism. Melissa Proffitt - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 22:50:02 -0800 From: "Richard R. Hopkins" Subject: Re: [AML] Public and Private Mormon Lit Tracie Laulusa asked: > I don't think I'm getting your definition of public vs private. Could you > start over and explain it to me? Sorry. What I'm talking about arises from my background as a California Mormon and my current status as a Utah Mormon. Recognizing that these terms may describe a certain type of individual not isolated in a particular region of the Church, as Melissa has said, the difference, in may experience, is that in California I did not feel at liberty to speak about the Church as much as I do here in Utah. One might liken the Church in California to a covert operation and in Utah, to an overt operation. The difference in a literary setting seems very obvious to me. In the genre of LDS fiction represented by RN's books, the Church is more out in the open. It is a consummate part of the character's life and is mentioned frequently, with one or more aspects of the story revolving directly around the fact that the characters are LDS. That I have labeled "public LDS fiction." In other fiction, such as we have published at Cornerstone and the stories I am currently writing, the focus is on non-Church aspects of the LDS character's life. There is significantly less reference to his or her being a Mormon or to his/her actions that are religious in nature. This I have called "private LDS fiction." It is not that the character's religion is hidden in any way. It's just that in private LDS fiction, as I defined it, the focus is on a story that has nothing to do with being a Mormon. There is simply a Mormon character in the story, and things about his Mormonness may be revealed in a positive or negative way. If one were to write public LDS fiction for a national audience, the idea, it seems to me, would be to open Mormon culture to a national audience in much the way Chaim Potok opened Jewish culture to many in this nation. As you have pointed out, this does not have to be done in a way that is preachy. With private LDS fiction, the goal would seem to be introducing the national audience to the Church through characters that give them an accurate, but hopefully positive, view of Mormons in general. This would be done indirectly, as part of a plot that has little or nothing to do with the Church, and hence will not seem preachy. This approach is more subtle, IMHO, though not necessarily more effective in reaching the ultimate goal, which for me is to let the national audience know that Mormons don't have horns and that we can be interesting people as well as devoted Christians. Richard Hopkins - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 00:23:14 -0700 From: Terry L Jeffress Subject: [AML] Prolific AML-List Posters (was: Significant LDS Authors) On 18 January 2002, Scott Parkin wrote: > If I have any impact on Mormon authors it's as a private critiquer > of stories, a general role as cheerleader, and as one of many part > time pop critics here on the AML-List (where I've probably posted > more words than any other single person in the list's history--I'm > certainly in the top ten, and my extended rambles have certainly put > a lot of words into the ether). Well, Scott's post got me wondering about the word counts of various posters, so I quickly wrote a little program and came up with the following: Total words posted to AML-List: 6,833,655 1. Scott Parkin 372,860 (5.5%) 2. Eric R. Samuelsen 323,462 (4.7%) 3. Thom Duncan 294,348 4. Harlow Clark 278,976 5. Jonathan Langford 248,225 6. D. Michael Martindale 210,761 7. Clark Goble 192,497 8. Christopher Bigelow 139,969 9. Linda Adams 133,952 10. Jacob Proffitt 131,632 11. Rex Goode 117,415 12. Michael Austin 115,226 13. Larry Jackson 100,277 14. J. Scott Bronson 99,534 15. Andrew R. Hall 97,446 16. Ben Parkinson 95,310 17. Ed Snow 91,165 18. Debra Brown 83,460 19. Richard Johnson 82,071 20. Kent S. Larsen II 81,741 Now it occurred to me that our top posters have written and posted enough material for a novel. Not that I want to discourage anyone from posting, but we do spend a lot of time here. I always seem to have time for AML-List, so if I can get 50,000 words written here, I should certainly have the time to compose at least as many words of fiction. Before anyone jumps up and down, let me just repeat that I wrote this program quickly. The program by no means takes into account everything, but I think it has produced a fairly accurate ordering of the top posters. Points of Interest and Known Problems - ------------------------------------- -- The program looks at the archived posts from the beginning of the list through December 2001. Posts from this month do not appear in the tally. -- The program attempts to count only original text. It chooses to ignore quoted lines that begin with > and |, but any other quoting mechanism will skew the word counts higher. -- The program also attempts to ignore signature lines, but many people do not us the standard signature marker "--". The program looks for any line that begins with two or more of the characters -, =, and _ and considers those lines to end the content. -- The program identifies posters by email address and attempts (in a crude manual way) to consolidate the word counts of individuals by combining all the email addresses used by each person. {Actually, I only searched through the results for the top 30 posters. So if you changed your email address a lot, you may not appear here.) (And some of you have had way too many addresses in the past 7 years: Thom, Rex, Scott, Chris.) -- Benson Parkinson's count is wrong. The way the Weber computer archived the messages, the messages from people other than Benson have two headers. I wrote the program to ignore the first header, but this also means that posts that came directly from Benson through the Weber system also get ignored. (Someday, when I write my threaded index and search engine of the list archives, I'll have to fix this problem, but for now, I just elected laziness.) -- I wrote the program so I could easily tabulate single months or years. For example in 2001, D. Michael wrote 80,124 words, beating Scott Parkin by about 2,400 words. -- The program counts any content as content. So a forwarded Deseret News article counts the same as literary criticism and reviews. -- The list has had about 230 unique posters. Of course, many duplicates might still remain and lower this number significantly. Now if you've made it this far into the post, you probably have thought, "Gee, Terry just has way too much time on his hands." Well, you hit the nail on the head. I got the axe from my former company a week ago Friday. I have registered for unemployment and have started looking for a new technical writing or editing job, but the market looks really awful right now. So if you know of any good openings (or even bad openings), I'd welcome the information. - -- Terry L Jeffress | What senses do we lack that we cannot see another South Jordan, UT | world all around us? -- Frank Herbert - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 09:43:16 -0500 From: "Kristy Thomas" Subject: Re: [AML] Mormon Satire I just have one for Chris... Mormon entrepreneur sings "We thank thee, oh God, for a profit." Kristy Thomas _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 12:25:42 -0800 From: harlowclark@juno.com Subject: Re: [AML] Ayn RAND, _Atlas Shrugged_ OK, our esteemed moderator (moderately esteemed?) asked if someone could make some kind of explicit tie-in to MoLit, and Eric Samuelsen asked if someone could show how Ayn Rand is not Korihor. I can't do the second for reasons that will be apparent below, but this discussion has been interesting because a lot of my fiction deals with the perils of living by ideas. I'm attracted to characters who care about ideas, and think about issues ('Boring.' adj. "Pertaining to stories about people who live in their heads or the head of Hollow Cluck"). One of my recurrent themes is the pain of living in a society that defines large parts of itself by reference to the word _self_. So here's a couple of comments about recent comments. More in another post. On Thu, 17 Jan 2002 18:58:13 -0500 "Eric D. Dixon" gives a useful summary of the foundations of Ayn Rand's philosophy, including this comment: > Rand preferred to define the word "selfish" as "rational > self-interest," meaning we're supposed to look out for our own > interests as opposed to compromising them in favor of someone else's > interest, judgment, or morality. When we were studying Heart of Darkness in Steve Walker's modern BritLit class he said, "I don't trust Marlow. He's a compromiser." I replied, "You have to be awfully sure of your position to say that compromise is morally suspect." He said (as (my mother told me later) he is wont to), "Well, you may be right about that." In my class paper I argued against the traditional view of Kurtz as a fallen hero, arguing instead that all the archetypal image of the hero surrounds Marlow, not Kurtz. Marlow is the one who sits in lotus position--enlightenment. Marlow is the one who returns. Marlow is the one who brings the boon, taking not only the sailors who listen to him, not only the sailors who listen to them retell his story, but us into the heart of darkness and bringing all out safely. (It was my father who pointed out to me that the structure of a story within a story within a story makes HOD a parable about art's power to take us into even the worst experiences and bring us safely back.) So 15 years later Steve sent me an e-mail saying he had that day read my paper to his class. "It stands the test of time, my friend." I suppose my point with that story is that it is sometimes better (for your soul at least) to compromise what you want in favor of someone else's mature, considered judgement--better to compromise than to step off into the horror, the horror. Indeed, I would say that it is often better to act in someone else's interests instead of your own. My Seattle stories play around the ins and outs of that idea. One character uses it to degrade and destroy her husband. That doesn't mean looking out or other peoples' interests in necessarily bad--it means that any idea or philosophy can be perverted. And On Thu, 17 Jan 2002 16:11:02 -0700 "Peter E. Chamberlain" writes: > You could also say that everything we do that is seemingly altruistic > is ultimately selfishly motivated because of the beneficence of God. > We know that God blesses us beyond any effort that we make. So > in the back of our heads we know that ultimately any good we do > will be paid back to us tenfold by God. I think in this way Rand's > idea of supreme selfishness fits with the gospel. It may be cynical > but I think it works. I don't think it works and I don't think it fits with the gospel. King Benjamin's teaching that God immediately blesses us is a rebuke to the idea that we have any right at all to withhold the fruits of our labor from others. It is not a treatise on how to get wealthy by obeying God's commandments. Benjamin starts that section by noting that we are no better than the dust of the earth because we were created out of the dust, but that gift of a physical body is unmatchable--we can never give God a gift that can match that gift, and even if we tried, even if everything we did was an act of praise and service to we couldn't match or better that gift, because he immediately blesses us, which puts us more into his debt. A cynical reading would be to think of God as the eternal oppressor who will never let us out of debt, but though he uses an economic term, Benjamin doesn't define blessings are economic, but as something freely given. Indeed, even if we don't serve God, he still blesses us with continued breath. Benjamin emphasizes this and in doing so emphatically rejects the idea that we should do good so that the blessings can be returned ten- or hundred- or thousand-fold to us. Rather, he tells us, because God gives to us freely we have been Our life is already a greater blessing than we can ever repay--even if we were to do nothing, he implies, the fact of continued breath is a blessing that comes to us freely. His repeated point is that God's blessings flow to us so freely, selflessly, that we ought to be free and selfless in serving each other. Benjamin emphasizes that God blesses us even when we don't serve him by saying that it is a sin to withhold our substance from a beggar just because we think the beggar has gotten himself into the situation and isn't worthy of our help. He calls that attitude sinful, and then emphasizes the sinfulness of that attitude through questions "For behold, are we not all beggars? Do we not all depend upon the same Being, Even God, for all the substance which we have, for both food and raiment, and for gold, and for silver, and for all the riches which we have of every kind?" But Benjamin doesn't leave those as rhetorical questions. He doesn't want us to think of being beggars as an abstract state, so he makes an observation: "And behold, even at this time, ye have been calling on his name and begging for a remission of your sins. And has he suffered that ye have begged in vain? Nay" (Mosiah 4:19-20) Based on what I've heard in this discussion I don't think Rand would like Benjamin's ideas. Rob Lauer may have a different take on her possible attitude toward Benjamin, but if Andrew Hall's 18 Jan 2002 comment accurately reflects her ideas, I suspect she would likely consider him foolish, maybe dangerous. > Her critique of socialism and altruism certainly was devastating. > What she says about charity destroying the life force of the > receiver was very convincing. OK, let me be rude here and ask a variant of what Lionel Trilling says it the insistent impolite question of modern literature ('Are you saved or damned?'). Have you received a remission of your sins? Do you feel that that blessing and others you receive freely from God destroy your life force? Yes, I'm rejecting an author's ideas without having read them--always dangerous, probably sinful, but my of lack desire to read Ayn Rand doesn't come from a fear of ideas that challenge my world and assumptions. Last April I was laid off after months of promises that a big raise was just around the corner. It has been a tough time and we have mounting bills and exhausted unemployment. I know considerable stress, as does Donna. Still, I am living a whole lot better, have all my life, than a very very very large number of my Heavenly Parents' earthly children. So the assumptions I want my reading to challenge are those that keep me self-righteously believing that I'm better than the drunks who panhandle across the street from the Temple and the Jose Schmidt Memorial Official Hotel of the 2002 Olympics, or benighted writers like Ayn Rand or Hollow Cluck (or Ku Klux Klan?--Forgive me the puns. As my mother told me, _Soderborg_ can be translated as Southcastle, or South of the Castle. It means we lived at court. In doing some geneological research recently I found that my ancestor was a jester who told so many puns that the king threatened to hang him if he told another, which (could he do otherwise?) he did. As he stood on the gallows, a messenger from the king rode up and told him the king would spare his life if he just wouldn't make any more puns. Grandpa said the Swedish equivalent of, "Ah, no noose is good noose," and died happily (Actually, he asked them to make the noose about the size of his nose. They asked why and g-g-g-g-grandpa said, 'Oh, nose noose is good noose.') Of course, my grandfather, as a Word-of-Wisdom-loving bishop would have changed that to "No snoose is good snoose.") (Oh, oh, just when I thought I had escaped the puns, I reread a half-story I last worked on a few years back and realized I had named two characters Ruth and Jesse just so I could make a pun: A few minutes later they arrived at Jesse and Ruth's apartment. They had had a baby, Tabitha, last fall. The first Sunday Ruth brought her baby to church, Calvin had said, "How's the Ruth and the offspring of Jesse?" (Of course, Calvin's name is itself a pun because his adult autistic foster son is named Charley Hobbes,.)) I want to read, and to understand and to challenge myself with works that will teach me about the sins of self- ishness, of living in a society where we use the hyphenated self- as a prefix to describe our highest values, esteem and actualization, for example. I don't think I can find that in Ayn Rand, but I may find it in Louis Owens, whose _Bone Game_ moved me profoundly because the main narrative is mercy and rescue. I particularly like the scene where almost 100-yr-old Luther and his nephew Hoey receive a revelation from another old man telling them to go to a certain place and wait--he knows that a girl has just been kidnapped by witches (not Wiccans, rather, men who use their spiritual powers for evil) and needs rescue. I also love the scene in _The Sharpest Sight_ where Hoey makes a sweat lodge for a girl who's just been raped and who he knows is probably involved in his son's murder. I have more to say but I'll cluck that out in another post. Harlow S. Clark ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 09:38:55 -0700 From: "Brown" Subject: Re: [AML] New Yorker article Good comments, Chris. It's a LITTLE like informing kids. You don't give them the whole schmear until they can understand and accept the few bits and pieces you must so pussy-footingly (!) present. Marilyn Brown - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 10:33:18 -0700 From: Barbara Hume Subject: Re: [AML] Re: J. Scott BRONSON, _Stones_ (Pt. 2) At 09:25 PM 1/21/02, you wrote: > [I hope that it can do that for many people. That is the intent > of the author.] Well, I read Scott's discussion of his thoughts behind the plays all the way through, and found it fascinating. I am very glad I attended the plays, and wish I had the opportunity to see them again. With me, Scott certainly attained his goal of clobbering the audience emotionally -- I agree with him that emotional impact is more life-changing than the sterility of intellectual examination. Both my grandson and I felt that we gained a great deal from the experience. I appreciate the fact that Scott's work is real and human -- it draws me in and involves me, rather than distancing me. And it uses up an awful lot of Kleenex. Barbara R. Hume Provo, Utah - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 10:41:59 -0800 From: harlowclark@juno.com Subject: [AML] Margaret YOUNG and Darius GRAY, _Bound for Canaan_ (Daily Herald) [This appeared in the Daily Herald, (www.heraldextra.com Wed. Jan. 23, 02 p. c3. I really enjoy being able to call people up and say something like, "Hi, I'm an annoying feature writer from the Daily Herald." Most of them will actually talk to me. (Of course, there was that unfortunate incident with Maggie Jung who said something about reading my inflammatory views on AML-Rag and my scurrilous reviews of her books. Fortunately, her co-arthur Darius "The Gray" King was able to give a few resonant hollow clucks and calm her down before she got to the closet with the shotgun in it.) Anyway, I enjoyed this interview a lot. I mentioned that my nephew, Marden, did a paper on author dustjacket photos and said that you can tell when Orson Scott Card got control of his contracts because his picture stopped appearing, and that I love Darius' dustjacket photo on _One Wide River to Cross_ because his look says, "Oh, this is so silly to have my picture taken for a dustjacket." Margaret told me there's a new photo of Darius, but not her, for the second volume] Just ahead of Martin Luther King's birthday, and Black History Month, Deseret Book has released the second volume of Provo author Margaret Young and her co-author Darius Gray's trilogy, "Standing on the Promises." The trilogy explores the lives of Black Mormon Pioneers. Young says that the first volume, "One Wide River to Cross," was introductory. The second volume, "Bound for Canaan" follows the characters from 1838 Nauvoo, to 1891 Salt Lake City, and includes a photo on the cover of Green Flake's daughter, Lucinda, with 2 of her daughters. Young and Gray, are getting ready to go to Washington DC at the end of the month , where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is hosting the first display of the collection that will become the National Museum of African American History and Culture (the NMAAHC) Washington DC Temple Visitors' Center. Young says the exhibit has a room for Mormon artifacts, including a cup that belonged to Elijah Abel, "Xes for the signatures of some of the black pioneers," photos of some of the black pioneers, and some of their stories. "Bill Hartley has this gorgeous portrait of Sam and Amanda Chambers, that we have and we'll take out with us." The NMAAHC exhibit opens Friday, February 1. For more information, call the Visitors' Center at 301-587-0144, or e-mail vcwashington@ldschurch.org. On Thursday Jan 24, 5-7:00 p.m. Young and Gray will be doing a presentation and book signing at Benchmark Books, 3269 S. Main, Suite 251, Salt Lake. (E-mail Benchmarkbooks@netzero.net). "They're even going to serve refreshments," Young says. Talking about the book is important to the authors. "Basically we said, 'We don't want to do anymore signings without talking," Young said, adding that part of book two deals with the marriage of Louis Gray. "We don't know how Darius's great-grandfather got married," but it was a formal marriage, not a broom-jumping, so they created an incident where "slavery reproduces its own products," that is, where Louis's master takes him to a slave auction to find a wife. "We wrote the scene and did our process of reading it out loud and we were just crying at the end. It was so moving to have real names of people we were connected with." [One note: The story about the slave auction is the kind of quote I love to include in stories--a moving comment that says something significant about the people in the article. Margaret also told me that there was some risk to the slave owner in having a formal marriage, because recognizing a marriage made it more difficult to split the family up by selling members away. I told her that the phrase "slavery reproduces its own products," reminded me of a comment I read in The Nation a few years ago. I don't know anything about slave family size, but slave owners surely had an interest in thinking of slave children as products because for decades before slavery ended they couldn't legally import new slaves. The author in The Nation was commenting on the attitudes of people who believe that God intended America to be a white nation. He said that since importing new slaves was banned in the 1820s most African-American families had been in America longer than most white families.] Harlow S. Clark ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 11:12:40 -0700 From: BJ Rowley Subject: Re: [AML] Rachel NUNES, Non-Mormon Book _A Greater Love_, by Rachel Nunes. Published by Trubeckon Books (Rachel's own label) in April 2000. Retail: $12.95 Distributed by Evans Book. Barbara Hume wrote: > At 02:53 PM 1/18/02, you wrote: > >> As accurate a depiction of Mormon culture as Nunes's books are, I don't >> believe they would succeed well on the national market for those >> reasons. >> The fact that they are selling so well indicates that they do >> resonate with >> the LDS population. > > > Rachel has written a book not set in the LDS culture. It takes place > in Portugal, and the characters are not Mormon. You might like to try > it to see how you like it. Unfortunately, with my Swiss-cheesy brain I > can't remember the title or the publisher, even though I edited it > (and Rachel delighted in showing me a mistake in the texts when the > published book came out!). It has the flavor of a Nunes novel, but in > my opinion it has more intensity because she wasn't blandized by her > usual LDS publisher. > > barbara hume > - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 11:40:25 -0700 From: margaret young Subject: Re: [AML] 2001 Mormon Novels in Review Andrew is just amazing in keeping up with LDS books and publishers. Just a note: Lewis Horne, author of the short story collection from Signature out this year, is my brother-in-law's father-in-law. (Better understood: Bruce's brother, Larry--who is my age [46]--finally got married. This was a true sign that the Second Coming is really, really close. It's his first marriage, and hers. She is Christine Horne (keeping her maiden name) and they were married in a remarkable ceremony in Bali. Larry wore a Bali "dress" and make-up, and Christine was dazzlingly draped in silks and veils. The ceremony was multi-denominational. Of course, none of us family members could afford to attend, but it was captured on video. At the reception (in Utah), I met Christine's father, Lewis Horne, and was thrilled to get his book of short stories for Christmas. I have read only one thus far--not for lack of interest but for lack of time. It's good. He does well. I think Jeff Needle should read the whole thing and write a review. I probably won't get to it for another two years, and it is nice when books from Signature sell. I just got my latest royalty check from Signature for _Love Chains_: eighteen dollars. (Of course, _Love Chains_ is pretty old by now.) I'd like to see Signature continue to produce quality fiction, so you avid readers please do purchase Horne's collection. [Margaret Young] - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 11:31:49 -0800 From: "Jeff Needle" Subject: [AML] LUND, _Come Unto Me_ I was generously selected by Jana to review Lund's volume 2 of his fictional story set in the time of Christ. I've read about as much as I can without having a major nervous breakdown. I would love to send this book to anyone who will be willing to read it and review it. I'll pay all the costs. Any takers? - ----- Jeff Needle jeff.needle@general.com "We're all only fragile threads, but what a tapestry we make." Jerry Ellis, "Walking the Trail" - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 17:10:58 -0600 From: Linda Adams Subject: Re: [AML] Annual Movie Tabulation [MOD: I'm letting this through as a response to a specific question that had been made of Linda.] I'm wishing that the Linda, (if I'm not mistaken, the author >Irreantum-published poem "Screwed His Brains Out" or something to that >effect) would compare and contrast the movie Clueless and her poem. I'm not >being faciteous. > >Alan Mitchell Alan, It's a science-fiction poem titled, "Positronic Love Affair," and is literally about a person screwing a postitronic robotic brain in and out of her robot-lover's head. (Frankly I was surprised Irreantum took it in the first place, but pleased.) It's science fiction, so I don't know how it compares at all to Jane Austen or "Clueless," but I'm assuming your question comes from the sexual content present apparently in both works? As far as my poem goes, I never said it was LDS, or LDS valued, or that everything I write must contain LDS values. Also it is an unknown, in my poem, whether or not the two characters are married (they could very well be), or even whether anything actually resembling sex between two sentient beings is actually going on. As far as "Clueless" goes, I have been responding to the statements that others have made that this was "clearly" a movie containing strong LDS values, where the sexual values presented within it are certainly *not* LDS values in my opinion. I disagreed with those specific statements. I don't disagree with the movie's right to exist or other people's right to enjoy it, only that I don't feel that the attitude presented in the film of waiting for the "right" person to go to bed with is an LDS moral teaching. I made and make no such claims concerning my own specific works of poetry or fiction (except that my novel, _Prodigal Journey_ does have LDS characters who behave like Latter-day Saints in most cases, and is about the Last Days and fictional events leading up to the establishment of New Jerusalem). I hope this clarifies any apparent hypocrisy between what I personally choose to write about and publish, and what I disagreed with was being said about this particular film. Linda Adams Linda Adams adamszoo@sprintmail.com http://home.sprintmail.com/~adamszoo - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 09:00:04 -0700 From: "Brown" Subject: Re: [AML] New Yorker Article (was: Life in Mormon Culture) If it wasn't by Tolstoy "at all" then does anybody know who wrote it? Marilyn Brown - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 11:42:44 -0200 From: "Tom Johnson" Subject: Re: [AML] New Yorker article The New Yorker article, while for the most part accurate, failed to explain why anyone would want to be Mormon--a pressing question for an essay on the fasting growing religion in the world. Wright's intent, on the other hand, may have simply been to pressure the church into confronting its past. In that case, I think it was an article to our benefit. Overall, though, hearing those old issues resurged and presented in matter-of-fact ways seemed pretty cliche and not too different from every other run-of-the-mill anti-Mormon essay. For the prestigious New Yorker and its great caste of writers, I would expect something a little more creative. Tom Johnson - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 14:27:15 -0600 From: Linda Adams Subject: RE: [AML] Annual Movie Tabulation At 02:53 PM 1/18/02, you wrote: >Huh? How'd you get that? The heroine is not ashamed of being a virgin. >"You know how picky I am about my shoes. And they only go on my feet." >She's not annoyed by her virginity at all and never *does* lose it. >Further, after her attempted seduction of Christian, she tells her >friends "I can't believe how capricious I was." Hooray for a film with >teens that treats virginity as if it were a big deal. Teens who treat >sex as if it were a big deal. No, at the very end when she is kissing her "Mr. Right," in a voice-over, she *does* state she loses it, with him. The sexual theme is, granted, not as bad as it could have been, but she is only waiting for the "right" person to have it with. "Picky" --as in choosing a pair of shoes--is about right. (The same went for her best friend, whose "technical virginity" with her boyfriend went out the window after the driving-on-the-freeway scene.) It's no different an attitude than the majority of decent, non-LDS teens out there--"I'm waiting until I find the right person" or "until I'm really in love." I STILL argue that this attitude, while prevalent in American culture, is NOT an LDS moral value. I admit my judgment of the movie was probably clouded by my watching it for appropriateness for my daughter--I'm sure I was more sensitized to certain things than otherwise. If it had been recommended to me by friends or by the List as a great movie, perhaps I'd have been more open-minded. But I still doubt I'd have liked it. I am entitled to my opinion, am I not? Linda Linda Adams adamszoo@sprintmail.com http://home.sprintmail.com/~adamszoo - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ End of aml-list-digest V1 #588 ******************************