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September 28, 2006

And Now For Something Completely Different

I actually have more I want to say, about recent topics here, both movies and religion, together. But cleaning out a bunch of old notebooks the other day, I found this strange little thing, and just had to share. It's my attempt at an exercise I devised for my creative writing students several years ago. I gave them a list of common items and made them A) choose a specific example of that general class of thing and B) describe it in detail, and then if possible, C) explain how and why that thing was a metaphor for them. I did the exercise as well, and here are my answers. If anyone else wants to adopt this as a meme, I'd be flattered.

1. Dessert. Ice cream. Wait-- fudge upside down cake? No. Homemade ice cream from Aunt Hazel and Uncle Walter's freezer, like we would always have at family reunions. You can eat so much of it. (Well, I can eat so much of it.) Labor intensive. Rich. Both decadent and homey--after all, it's made by old Mormons and uses stuff you have on a farm. But it's rich and cold and again, labor intensive-- used to be seasonal-- How am I a big bowl of ice cream?

Or maybe hot Dr Pepper-- Eccentric-- goofy-- way too sugary-- bad for you-- not at all dignified. But I'm used to it

2. Article of clothing. A skirt-- no, a dress-- no, a skirt. I'm most comfortable in a dress or skirt--I like the freedom of movement-- plus pants never fit me. It doesn't have to be a girly girl skirt, but it can be-- but mostly I don't feel as comfortable in pants. I like how dressed float and flow

3. Kitchen implement. Knife. No--a dish. Why is a dish a metaphor or term for an attractive woman? Because she serves? Because you want to eat her up? Think more on this.
The dish ran away with the spoon.

4. TV character. Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Nerdy-- over-extended-- too accommodating-- in some ways bad at my job but in other ways really good at it. TIRED. Over-qualified.

5. Fruit. Pineapple--all prickly. Robust. A sign of hospitality. Expensive. Always a bit moldy at the stem-- how is that relevant? A small sign of rot? You have to squeeze it to see if it's ripe but you can never be sure. It has a crown. You can't eat one all by yourself but you have to peel it all at once-- well, that's not relevant; it takes longer than that to get to know me. SO ACIDIC! It will burn your mouth. And yet it's also very sweet.

6. Fairy tale character. Sleeping Beauty--except I'm like Insomnia Beauty. Someday a handsome prince will come along and make it OK to fall asleep. I'll prick my finger--or not--and fall into a deep, contented sleep that lasts eight hours-- practically forever. And then when I wake he'll be at my side and he'll make it OK to be awake and the process will repeat itself over and over and I will be the Sleeping Beauty from then on out.

Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (1)

September 26, 2006

Crouching Horse-Horse-Tiger-Tiger Hidden Dragon

Since I've had a discussion of movies, I thought I'd continue the trend. Here's a review I wrote of "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" when it came out.

One of the first things I learned to say when I began studying Chinese was mamahuhu, which means "horse-horse-tiger-tiger." It is an idiomatic expression denoting something which is an uncomfortable hybrid, neither successfully this or that, nor even a worthy combination of the two; it's often translated as "mediocre" or "so-so." One of the first things I heard about Ang Lee's new movie, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, was that Lee had described it as "Bruce Lee meets Jane Austen;" one of his assistants called it "Sense and Sensibility with sword fights."

I'm a big fan of Austen, and if there were anyone who could blend Bruce Lee and Austen successfully, it would be Ang Lee, whose first three movies were set (at least in part) in his native Taiwan; his fourth movie was Sense and Sensibility (1995). But I would have to say that I found this movie more horse-horse-tiger-tiger than tiger-tiger-dragon-dragon.

One big disappointment was the primary love story. "Jane Austen meets anything" must have at least one love story, and Crouching Tiger has several. The first involves Li Mu Bai (Chow Yung Fat) and Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), who have long been in love but never admitted it for a variety of reasons, including the fact that Shu Lien's fiance was killed in battle next to Li Mu Bai. But their passion, supposedly on the point of bursting forth after years of restraint, isn't portrayed successfully. Mu Bai displays far greater passion in his devotion to his sword the Green Destiny, or his attempts to woo Jen (Zhang Ziyi), who repeatedly steals the Green Destiny from him, into becoming his disciple. When Jen finally asks, "Is it the sword or me you really want?" I was glad the movie acknowledged the force of his attraction to her.

Jen is involved in the rest of the love stories, usually as the one who breaks a heart. The love affair I cared about most involved Jen and Lo, a bandit living in the western desert whom Jen pursues because he steals her comb. "I'm not big or tall, but I'm quick as the wind" he tells Jen, and he could add that he's charming, funny and fairly gentlemanly--Henry Tilney residing in a cave rather than Northanger Abbey. But Jen is no more faithful to him than she is to her house maid/martial arts instructor Jade Fox or to her adopted sister Shu Lien.

Aside from Jen, the characters seem to have motivations that are not only simple but simplistic. Jade Fox (Chen Pei Pei) seeks esoteric knowledge because she is bad and wants to be able to defy social convention and kill those who thwart her; Li Mu Bai is good because he follows the rules and wants to kill Jade Fox. Yu Shu Lien is good because she is patient, long-suffering and honors the memory of her dead fiance; Yu Jen is bad because she doesn't even honor her living fiance--well, that doesn't quite make her bad, but her willingness to steal, lie, and break promises isn't quite enough to make her bad, either. She gets to be not quite good or bad, but it seems that the main reason for that might simply be that she's young and pretty.

Other elements of the movie offer more rewards. Like the rest of Lee's work, Crouching Tiger is beautifully filmed, gorgeous to look at. The fight scenes are amazing, energetic and inspiring dances precisely choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping, the expert responsible for designing the similarly remarkable acrobatics in The Matrix. It's rare that anyone die in these fights scenes--Jade Fox is the only character evil enough to actually kill someone else--so you can enjoy them for the athletic prowess (and flying ability) of the combatants. Virtually every fight involves Jen, who usually wins. Especially notable is her handiwork, footwork and swordplay as she takes on an entire tavernful of tough guys, one or two or six at a time, defeating them all, leaving them with broken bones or missing teeth but steady pulses.

I was told I'd love this movie, and I wanted to. After all, it's in Chinese, most of the main characters are women, it's up for Best Picture and it isn't Gladiator. But I didn't love it. I thought it was OK. I don't feel I wasted either the price of the ticket or the time required to see it, but I was disappointed. I could see the crouching--or maybe it was cowering?-- horse-horse-tiger-tiger, but the hidden dragon stayed far too hidden.

Posted by Holly at 8:01 AM | Comments (1)

September 24, 2006

Appropriately Instructive Movies about the Power of Art

A friend recently emailed me and asked me for suggestions for movies he might show in his composition course, which includes some essays on art--from what I know of the reader our composition department uses, I'm guessing Aristotle's Poetics and the like. He didn't ask me specifically for movies that are about the power of art--rather, he specified that he wanted movies "the artistic powers of which are slightly better than what the students are used to. Yet I don't want to bore them either."

But that didn't matter because I read the message wrong at first--it was first thing in the morning and I was tired--and spent a couple of hours trying to think up movies about the power of art which would please an audience of 18-year-olds.

Two of my favorite movies about the topic--actually, two of my favorite movies, period--are Babette's Feast (in Danish with English subtitles, rated G) and Cinema Paradiso (in Italian with English subtitles, and only a little bit sexy), and it is my unfortunate experience that 18-year-olds don't tend to love subtitles.

There are plenty of movies--particularly of a certain era--about the power of movies and performance: Singin' in the Rain, perhaps, or All About Eve, or Sunset Boulevard. SitR is also one of my favorite movies but I realize not everyone likes musicals (although I also realize that not liking musicals is both a character flaw and a moral failing). I adore All About Eve but some people dismiss it as a chick movie. Sunset Boulevard might be a good choice.... I let students make up missed quizzes and such by watching movies and they consistently remark that SB knocks them out, and they also like knowing where the line "I'm ready for my close-up" comes from.

Another really great movie about the power of movies All About My Mother but it's got that subtitle thing again. And it's really good, but it's a downer--it's one of the few Almodovar movies I really don't want to see again.

In the right mood I might argue that Strictly Ballroom is a movie about the power of art.... but it might also be a movie a fair number of them have seen, since its director, Baz Luhrmann, also directed that nasty business Moulin Rouge.

Then there are always biopics of artists, Frida and the like--there are dozens of those. I can't think of any good biopics of writers at the moment except for Wilde, and the focus of that is the destruction wrought in his life by Bosie. Though that does remind me of a very old black and white version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is about the power of art....

So anyway, I don't very often poll my readers, but I'm asking for your help. I realize I'm framing this question in a way my friend didn't, but I figure, why not illustrate more than one point with the film he shows? So if you can think of a good movie about the power of art--or if you can remember seeing a movie when you were 18 that really knocked you out--please share.

Posted by Holly at 6:46 PM | Comments (15)

September 21, 2006

How to Judge Religion

I have been mulling over Matt's question about how to criticize religion and decided I was wrong to distance myself from Ms. Armstrong, especially when I remembered that she'd offered the best summary of I'd ever encountered on how to judge religion. If I'm not as close to her thinking as I might be, it's not because I think she's wrong but because I think I'm not as wise or developed as she is, and so not able to espouse her ideas with the commitment they deserve. I really think her work--especially "A History of God"--should be required reading for anyone struggling with recovery from Mormonism. As evidence, I offer this passage from a paper I delivered on her at the 2005 Sunstone symposium. The paper was entitled "Pain, Sorrow, Suffering, Failure, Despair and Occasional Moments of Transcendence: The Wisdom and Insights of Karen Armstrong." Here's something--as in a long something, as in four single-spaced pages--from the close, in case you're interested.

Note: Although Armstrong has published more than a dozen books--most of which I've read--I cited only five in this presentation. They are, in order of publication, "Through the Narrow Gate," "Beginning the World," "A History of God," "The Battle for God" and "The Spiral Staircase."

In 1981, Armstrong published Through the Narrow Gate. It didn't earn much money, but it did gain her some attention--enough that she was invited to comment on religious topics on television. Eventually she lands a job writing the text for a six-part television documentary on Saint Paul, and it is while doing research for this project that she realizes how profoundly ignorant she is about the origins of Christianity. She comes to the conclusion that it was not Jesus Christ or any of his immediate disciples who were the inventors of Christianity, but Saint Paul--hence the name of the series, The First Christian. She also realizes that she has never thought carefully about Christianity's two "sister religions," as she calls them, Judaism and Islam.

She studies the three monotheistic religions' relationships to each other when asked to write a television series on the Crusades. Calling the story of the Crusades "a hideous chronicle of human suffering, fantacism and cruelty" (258), she notes that studying them has a primary salutary, albeit painful, effect: "it broke [her] heart" (Staircase, 258). This broken heart, is, of course, a necessary spiritual development. As she notes,

All the world faiths put suffering at the top of their agenda, because it is an inescapable fact of human life, and unless you see things as they really are, you cannot live correctly. But even more important, if we deny our own pain, it is all too easy to dismiss the suffering of others. Every single one of the major traditions--Confucianism, Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as the monotheisms--teaches a spirituality of empathy, by means of which you relate your own suffering to that of others. (Staircase, 272)

Learning how to cultivate and practice empathy is part of what makes it possible for her to write remarkably sympathetic biographies of Muhammad and the Buddha, activities in which she "had to make a constant, imaginative attempt to enter empathically into the experience of another" (Staircase, 279). Admittedly, this is a difficult thing to do. It takes self-awareness, generosity and discipline to cultivate empathy, and even more hard work to act on it rather than resorting to anger and retaliation when someone attacks us or something we love. It is also necessary if we want to make any progress as spiritual beings, and much of religion has been designed to help us do that hard work. If religion fails in that primary task, it fails supremely and definitively. One of final insights offered in The Spiral Staircase is the absolute necessity of empathy as a criterion in judging the value of religion: Armstrong states,

The religious traditions were in unanimous agreement. The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology (Staircase 293).

Armstrong notes as well that "compassion is not always a popular virtue. In my lectures I have sometimes seen members of the audience glaring at me mutinously: where is the fun of religion, if you can't disapprove of other people! There are some people, I suspect, who would be outraged if, when they finally arrived in heaven, they found everybody else there as well" (297). But she stresses that especially since 9/11, "our task now is to mend our broken world; if religion cannot do that, it is worthless. And what our world needs now is not belief, not certainty, but compassionate action and practically expressed respect for the sacred value of all human beings, even our enemies" (304).

"Religion starts with the perception that something is wrong" (History, 32), Armstrong observes, and one of the things that is wrong is that the meaning of events is often not obviously manifest; rather, meaning has to be made, which is not always an easy task. There are experiences in life that logic cannot account for, and the unseen often seems more real than the tangible and concrete. We must find ways to adequately account for our lived reality, even if that means resorting to imaginative, symbolic ideas of how the world functions and what events and objects signify.

Above all, these ideas must work; when they cease to work, they are eventually discarded. Armstrong points out that "Abraham and Jacob both put their faith in [the god they called] El because he worked for them: they did not sit down and prove that he existed.... People would continue to adopt a particular concept of the divine because it worked for them, not because it was scientifically or philosophically sound" (History, 17).

Although Armstrong sees herself as sympathetic to and, in some ways, celebratory of religion and God, many devout Christians would be outraged by her concept of the divine. Armstrong sees belief in an anthropomorphic god, a glorified human being made divine, however much that belief continues to work for people, as both idolatry and a mark of immature spirituality. Discussing "a personal God who does everything that a human being does: he loves, judges, punishes, sees, hears, creates and destroys as we do," Armstrong acknowledges that such a deity "reflects an important religious insight: that no supreme value can be less than human" (History, 209) However, she continues,

A personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them. When he seems to fail to prevent a catastrophe or seems even to desire a tragedy, he can seem callous and cruel. A facile belief that a disaster is the will of God can make us accept things that are fundamentally unacceptable. The very fact that, as a person, God has a gender is also limiting: it means that the sexuality of half the human race is sacralized at the expense of the female and can lead to a neurotic and inadequate imbalance in human sexual mores. A personal God can be dangerous, therefore. Instead of pulling us beyond our limitations, 'he' can encourage us to remain complacently within them; 'he' can make us as cruel, callous, self-satisfied and partial as 'he' seems to be. Instead of inspiring the compassion that should characterize all advanced religion, 'he' can encourage us to judge, condemn and marginalize. It seems, therefore, that the idea of a personal God can only be a stage in our religious development. (History, 209-210).

In A History of God, Armstrong devotes 400 pages to detailing, contextualizing and explicating writings by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians, mystics, philosophers and scholars regarding the nature of God, the numinous unseen mystery that, however elusive, remains a genuine, felt presence throughout the world. Armstrong begins her history by considering briefly what these diverse monotheists might have told her as a teenager beginning her spiritual quest:

It would have saved me a great deal of anxiety to hear--from eminent monotheists in all three faiths--that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself. Other rabbis, priests and Sufis would have taken me to task for assuming that God was--in any sense--a reality "out there"; they would have warned me not to expect to experience him as an objective fact that could be discovered by the ordinary process of rational thought. They would have told me that in an important sense God was a product of the creative imagination, like the poetry and music that I found so inspiring. A few highly respected monotheists would have told me quietly and firmly that God did not really exist--and yet that "he" was the most important reality in the world. (History xx)

Armstrong calls attention to the fact that statements like that last one are often paradoxical by intent, a way to prevent us from considering God merely another object in the universe, like a molecule, a tree, a planet, or a black hole, albeit more distant and complex and somehow responsible for the other objects. She also considers the death of God, proclaimed by Nietzsche in 1882, devoting her final chapter to the question, "Does God Have a Future?" She contemplates the "god-shaped hole" left in the universe by the "disappearance" of God--the result, she stresses, of making him into an existent being who could be killed--and what that god-shaped hole means both to atheists who are happy to live without him and former believers who mourn his present absence.

The religious approach Armstrong learns to value over certain belief in a personalized god is an open-minded curiosity about the mystery that exceeds our human understanding and pervades our world, which can be encountered through a patient, thoughtful silence. Armstrong stresses repeatedly throughout her work that "Sacred texts cannot be perused like a holy encyclopedia, for clear information about the divine" (Staircase, 285). Rather, we should treat scripture as a kind of poetry,

which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way as you might listen to a difficult piece of music.... You have to give it your full attention, wait patiently upon it, and make an empty space for it in your mind. And finally the work declares itself to you, steals deeply into the interstices of your being, line by line, note by note, phrase by phase, until it becomes part of you forever. Like the words of a poem, a religious idea, myth, or doctrine points beyond itself to truths that are elusive, that resist words and conceptualization. If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its own inviolable holiness. (Staircase, 284)

In other words, Scripture and myth are attempts to make the unseen visible, to express the ineffable and to understand the unknowable. Therefore, if we consult statements about that which exists beyond the world of facts, which must be taken on faith, and is beyond normal comprehension, and read them as if they are provable, logical statements of fact, we will be misled. Instead, when thinking about God, we should open ourselves to things that stimulate our imaginative and creative faculties. Armstrong observes,

many people in the West would be dismayed if a leading theologian suggested that God was in some profound sense a product of the imagination. Yet it should be obvious that the imagination is the chief religious faculty. It has been defined by Jean-Paul Sartre as the ability to think of what is not. Human beings are the only animals who have the capacity to envisage something that is not present or something that does not yet exist but which is merely possible. The imagination has thus been the cause of our major achievements in science and technology as well as in art and religion.... The only way we can conceive of God, who remains imperceptible to the senses and to logical proof, is by means of symbols, which it is the chief function of the imaginative mind to interpret. (History, 233)

Posted by Holly at 8:55 AM | Comments (8)

September 20, 2006

More on the Religion Thing

In recent comments, Matt has raised the issue of how to criticize religion fairly and appropriately, a question that has stymied many people far wiser than I. Spike mentions that this was a question Marx sincerely and seriously grappled with. Here's an editorial by Jonathan Freedland from the Guardian about the Pope's comments and how NOT to critcize religion. A couple of excerpts:

The Pope seems unaware that, for hundreds of millions of people, religious affiliation is not a matter of intellectual adherence to a set of abstract principles, but a question of identity. Many Muslims, like many Jews or Hindus, may not fully subscribe to the religious doctrine concerned, and yet their Muslimness, or Jewishness or Hinduness, is a central part of their make-up. Theology plays a lesser part than history, culture, folklore, tradition and kinship. In this respect, religious groups begin to look more like ethnic ones. Which means that a slur on a religion is experienced much like a racist insult. Plenty of secularists and atheists struggle to understand this - wondering why they cannot slam, say, Catholicism the way they might attack, say, socialism - but the Pope, of all people, should have no such trouble. He should realise that when he declares Christianity a superior religion, as he did some years ago, that is heard by many as a statement that Christians are superior people.

and

What makes me shudder about the Pope's Regensburg lecture is that he appears to join Osama bin Laden in this effort to cast the current conflict as a clash of civilisations. Complicatedly, and dense in footnotes, he is, at bottom, trying to establish the superiority of one faith over another. His argument is that reason is intrinsic to Christianity, yet merely a contingent part of Islam.

But what sense is there in such a contest? If the most senior figure in Christendom effectively takes Bin Laden's bait and says that, yes, this is a war of religions, ours against yours, how can this end? Such a war cannot be quieted by the usual means of diplomacy or compromise. There can be no happy medium in matters of core belief: Muslims cannot meet Christians halfway on their belief that God spoke to Muhammad, just as Christians cannot compromise on Jesus's status as the son of God.

Good times, aye?

Posted by Holly at 7:12 AM | Comments (5)

September 19, 2006

They'd Be Boring If They Were Black, But the Thing Is, They're Green

I bought these shoes on sale years ago--like, ten--and left them in my closet to age. They were too mannish to suit my taste at that point--I know, I know, if I didn't really like them, why did I buy them? Well, I bought them because they were a super-duper bargain and because they are well made dark green Italian menswear Oxfords, and I knew, I just knew, some day they'd make me really, really happy. Sure enough, about two years ago, I pulled them off a top shelf, realized how awesome they are, and started wearing them with skirts. They are comfortable and a very pretty dark green--did I mention that they're green?

Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (8)

September 18, 2006

It's the Thought That Counts, Which Is Why These "Gentlemen" Can F**k Themselves with a 2X4

So, um, yeah, it's embarrassing to admit, but sometimes when I'm too busy to devote time to my own blog, I neglect other people's as well, not reading for a few days and then catching up on entries in batches. Which is what I'm doing this morning. I found this entry on Rebecca...and all that entails about trying to find a decent print news magazine to subscribe to. She asks for recommendations, and someone recommended "The Economist."

Which prompted me to leave this comment, which I am reproducing here because I like the story.

The Economist? Oh god, no! Run away in horror from The Economist! What a load of conservative tripe. My father gave me a subscription to said horrorshow for Chirstmas 2004, explaining his decision to do so by saying, "They endorsed Kerry for president."

To which I replied, "Dad, the freakin National Review, the conservative rag started by William F. Buckley, godfather of contemporary American conservativism, endorsed Kerry for president! Virtually everyone in the whole freakin' world [The Economist is British] realizes that George Bush should not be president!"

So then I got The Economist every freakin' week but couldn't bear to open it. It just started cluttering up my magazine stand and one day I decided to open an issue and saw that letters to the editor all still began with the saluation "Gentlemen."

It's the freakin 21st century and there's still some horrible retro news rag stressing that it's editorial board is male.

So that was it; I had to cancel my subscription. I called the toll-free number and talked to a very nice young woman who had to ask why I was canceling. I explained about the "Gentlemen" thing, adding, "Jesus fucking christ, can't these guys not act like assholes?"

To which she replied, very warmly and sympathetically, "It appears not."

And then I had to explain that it was a gift and ask her not to tell my dad that I was in essence returning his Christmas present.

She had no problem with that and agreed to send me the check for the refund, which was in the neighborhood of 60-70 bucks, and this was late April! If only I had canceled in early January.

p.s. Dale, I included a semi-colon in this post just for you.
p.p.s. Here's a great editorial by my idol Karen Armstrong on why what the pope said last week was bad.

Posted by Holly at 9:16 AM | Comments (10)

September 16, 2006

What I'm Busy with Right Now

As I've mentioned, I'm really busy right now. But what is it I'm busy doing? Well, for one thing, I'm teaching a bunch of very full classes--I have more students this semester than I've ever had before.

One of the primary duties listed in my job description is teaching creative writing in general to undergraduates, and literary nonfiction writing in specific. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, literary nonfiction is an umbrella phrase typically encompassing autobiography, memoir and the personal essay. Some people call it creative nonfiction. My department calls it "literary" nonfiction instead of "creative" nonfiction because essentially all writing involves acts of creation but not all writing is literary, and we want to stress that we're striving for a certain quality of writing. I don't get my knickers in a twist when I hear the phrase creative nonfiction, but I HATE the acronym CNF.

A book I often teach in both literature and writing courses (though I'm not teaching it this semester) is A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, a memoir about the deaths of his parents less than a month apart from different types of cancer, and his subsequent experiences as the appointed guardian of his younger brother Toph, who is orphaned at age nine. It has its problems, but students generally like it, and I like it for its preface, where Eggers lays out some of the theoretical and critical issues involved in the writing and reading of literary nonfiction. For instance, he suggests that readers who are bugged by the fact that he claims to be telling the truth do what readers have been doing for centuries: pretend it's fiction. He also appraises the quality of his book, and gives suggestions for reading and enjoy it. He suggests that his readers skip pages 239-35, noting that those pages concern "the lives of people in their early twenties, and those lives are very difficult to make interesting, even when they seemed interesting to those living them at the time."

Given that my students are typically in their early twenties if not their late teens, this statement has dire implications for their efforts as writers of nonfiction.

However, one of the classic genres of fictions is the bildungsroman, (from German bildung, "building" and French roman, "novel"), or the coming-of-age novel. In fact, many venerated first "novels" are essentially coming-of-age memoirs disguised as novels by the changing of a few names and the fudging of a few facts.

What makes literature about people in their early twenties "interesting"? Is it really so hard to make these lives interesting? And what are the implications of these questions for young writers in creative writing classes--who are sometimes not merely in their early twenties, but their late teens? How do young writers acquire the wisdom, the vision, the craft, the perspective, the insight to make accounts of their early lives not merely interesting, but works of art?

Trying to find answers to that question that satisfy me and my students is part of what I'm so busy with right now. Oh, and explaining when and where to use commas.

Posted by Holly at 1:48 PM | Comments (5)

September 14, 2006

New to My Collection

As I wrote Monday, I am really loving my camera. I wanted to come up with some worthy subjects to experiment on, and could think of nothing better than my shoes. This particular pair is among my recent acquisitions. I bought them this summer and unfortunately have not had an opportunity to wear them. I love them: they make my ankles look fabulous and I also like how the insole is pale blue, so that the shoe itself is a beautiful thing even when it's not on my foot.

Posted by Holly at 7:54 AM | Comments (5)

September 12, 2006

An Obvious Compound Word

Today one of my students gave me a poem built in part on questioning something I apparently said about heartbreak.

When I first got home from my mission I was suffering from what I would eventually come to call religious despair. On my mission I was suicidally depressed, though I lacked the initiative and the energy to do anything about my grief. I could not eat or sleep. I wept uncontrollably for nine weeks, so bereft that I could not stop my tears even in public.

And then I finished my mission, went home, and went back to work on my undergraduate degree. I was young and pretty and from a middle-class family. I liked wearing bright blue mascara and clean clothes. I still attended church. My suffering did not involve addiction or physical violence.

And so no one believed me when I talked about my unhappiness. God forbid I try to write a poem about the despair I had experienced! I remember a middle-aged gay male bartender responding with undisguised loathing to a poem I submitted in class attempting to describe the young, chaste, female trauma I'd endured. How dare I, he proclaimed! How dare I believe I knew anything of heartbreak!

And now that I am middle-aged, a young man is saying basically the same thing, because.... I can pay my own mortgage? Because there's still no addiction and physical violence in my life?

OK, I don't know a thing about heartbreak. I know nothing of it. I relinquish any claim to so dignified a word. What I know--all I know--is grief's assault on the rest of the body. If you want to talk about suffering rooted in and expressed through phlegm and bile and blood and bowels, then hey, I have something to say about that.

Posted by Holly at 11:59 PM | Comments (5)

September 11, 2006

An Enthusiastic Passenger of the Latest Bandwagon I'm Aboard

Find a mechanically sophisticated technological bandwagon (the computer and all the gadgets and programs that go with it, as opposed to, say, the pencil) and chances are good I was late getting on it. Moreover, when I did get on it, it was probably because someone else bought me a ticket, and I probably delayed using that ticket until it was about to expire.

A case in point: learning to drive. I didn't mind the idea of learning to drive, but I wasn't dying to start asking my parents for the keys, like most of my friends. I was perfectly happy to walk most places--we lived only two blocks from my high school--provided I didn't have to carry a lot of stuff. Plus, although I didn't realize it at the time, I was related to a bunch of bad drivers and had a skewed notion of how much anxiety was necessarily involved in operating a motor vehicle: I didn't realize that if you stayed calm, paid attention, drove the speed limit and weren't aggressive about trying to occupy the same exact area another vehicle was already in, you could often avoid accidents, horn-honking, being shouted at, and getting the finger.

I dutifully got my learner's permit at 15 years and seven months like I was supposed to, and my mother dutifully took me out for lessons. Let's just say that I preferred risking my life as the passenger of my big sister, who had crappy depth perception and no patience for on-coming traffic, to listening to my mother scream "Brake! Brake! Hit the damn brakes!" a full block before I approached an entirely deserted intersection in the nowhere beyond Lizard Bump (which is an actual place name, but not one with many inhabitants).

As a result I was several months past 16 before I finally got my license, not long before school let out. There was something going on in the summer that I would be expected to drive myself to, and it was necessary for me to be legal when doing so.

Then there was email. I loved (still love) actual letters, strokes of ink on real pieces of paper, and I wasn't interested in this ephemeral electronic nothing that other people could spy on. It wasn't until the summer of 1994, when the guy I was dating got annoyed that he couldn't send me email, set me down and taught me how to use the account provided for me by the university, that I realized email might have its virtues.

And that's the other thing about my approach to technological bandwagons: once I decide the time is right to climb up on one, once I find a way to adapt the technology to my specific needs, I often become an enthusiastic passenger, gushing to others on the wagon about how great the ride is, waving cheerfully to those we pass.

Driving wasn't like that, admittedly: distance permitting, I'd still rather walk. I don't have a phobia or anything, but truth be told, I don't really like sitting in a little metal container and then hurtling it down a stretch of asphalt while a bunch of other people in little metal containers are doing exactly the same thing.

But technologies that involve recording and relaying information are different, I am realizing.

I asked for a digital camera for Christmas because all the cool bloggers were using them. My mother gave me what I asked for, and my brother (who lives two doors down from my parents) charged the battery for me and showed me what the various function keys do. ("Mom must really like you," he said, admiring the camera's many spiffy features.) I brought it back home after Christmas, put it in a drawer, and left it there for eight months.

And then I thought, OK, it can't be that hard to use the damn thing, and there must be SOMETHING I really want to take a picture of.

Sure enough.

And now I love it! I plan to post a photo or two every week. In blogging terms at least, it seems that a picture is indeed worth a thousand words, and though my allegiance is still primarily to those thousand (and ten thousand, and one hundred thousand) words, I don't have to renounce it in order to add photos.

Posted by Holly at 11:11 AM | Comments (3)

September 9, 2006

My Glasses

There are so many things I would really like to blog about: I want to respond to Major Steel's entry about the music he loved in college and discuss this review I read on Salon of this book I really want to read, This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin. I have written nothing about Sunstone except an intro to the synposis I plan eventually to write. I reallly do intend to blog about knitting some day, though knitting is for me like being in love in that I find it so rewarding that I'd rather do it than write about it. Anyway, those are among the many topics I hope to find time to write about soon, but in the meantime you're getting a picture of my new glasses (which I am wearing this very moment, having picked them up yesterday--they are less cat-eye-ish than I remembered but at least the rhinestones are really truly there) perched on the book I'm currently reading in front of the basket where I store my knitting, which is currently a sweater I'm almost finished knitting.

Posted by Holly at 12:25 PM | Comments (4)

September 7, 2006

Feminist Carnival, Again

At the beginning of the summer I strayed from my commitment to blogging about feminism, but there at the end, when I started preparing for Sunstone, I got it back.... Anyway, the current carnival is up at Redemption Blues. I've perused some of the other very fine offerings--in particular I was struck by this post about the Stained Glass Ceiling: Rankism in Action on My Left Wing. The author, Breakingranks, neatly summarized my experience with Mormonism:

Lately, PR folk have been fond of the idea that markets are conversations. This implies a level playing field where people negotiate as equals and make fair exchanges. However, the spiritual authority hijacks the market. The spiritual authority stands on a platform and preaches to the masses. Spiritual authority is one (man's) vision imposed on all others, winning pre-eminence through guile, mass mobilization, and acts of verbal violence. The spiritual authority dictates reality, recording their vision on the world as if people were blank tapes. Perhaps spiritual authority does win in the marketplace of ideas and values, but perhaps we should ask ourselves why there should be a marketplace at all. And if there is a market, doesn't a diverse world imply niche markets of ideas instead of some beady-eyed guy shouting transcend, transcend, transcend!

Also wonderful: this post, Owning Beauty, on Basket of Eggs, about the significance of a beautiful blue dress she'd made.

Posted by Holly at 12:26 AM | Comments (3)

September 6, 2006

One Down, a Whole Bunch More to Go

Well, I survived the first day of the semester. It was a bit iffy there for a while--for one thing, I couldn't decide what to wear, and you must find the right outfit on the first day, because the wrong one can set a miserable tone you'll never recover from. In the end I wore what is almost my uniform: a long skirt (albeit a very cool one I made at the beginning of the summer and had never taught in before), a nice top, with my hair down but pulled off my face by a scarf.

The classes themselves were reasonably successful (except for the one where I tried to lecture the first day--won't do that again any time soon). I have high hopes that it will be a decent semester, although it's clear that it will be a busy one. So if I'm not as prolific in the next few months as I have been at times in the past, well, you'll know why.

Posted by Holly at 9:56 AM | Comments (9)

September 4, 2006

Lizzy Tudor in Film

Recently I watched two different two-part versions of the life of Elizabeth Tudor. The first was the 2005 HBO mini-series Elizabeth I, starring Helen Mirren and Jeremy Irons (both of whom I always like to watch), and the second was the 2005 Masterpiece Theatre mini-series The Virgin Queen, starring Anne-Marie Duff, a young Irish actress who was also in The Magdalene Sisters. Helen Mirren was WAY better. (I have every certainty that she deserved the Emmy she won for this role.) She is regal to begin with and the character as written for her was much wittier, wiser, more powerful. In the Duff version, there were scenes where the queen was mocked and ridiculed, and it was easily done because there was something ridiculous about her character, and something ridiculous about a 30-something woman playing a 60-something crone (and Duff's portrayal WAS a crone).

When I first moved to the town I live in now, I went to check out the public library and what it had to offer. A librarian tried really hard to sell me on their facilities for genealogical research. "I had a bunch of great aunts who traced the family way back," I said. "There's not much more to be done unless someone wants to go look at tombstones and read parish records in rural Germany or France."

"Oh," the librarian said, smiling. "Don't underestimate what we have to offer, especially now that libraries are link. You'd be surprised."

"No, you'd be surprised," I said. "Those great aunts of mine were hard-core Mormons."

The librarian lost her smile and nodded. She knew, as anyone who does genealogical research knows, that the Mormons are the most diligent and thorough genealogists in the world.

I mention this because it's one reason I have always had an interest in the British monarchy: those great aunts established that among my ancestors are Wicked King John (who signed the Magna Carta) and William the Conqueror (a.k.a. William the Bastard, Norman invader of England). It's not like I claimed an affinity for royalty or liked to imagine I could have been a princess; rather, I was fascinated to think of my ancestors living in drafty stone castles, galloping through dappled forest in hot pursuit of wild bore, begetting scores of illegitimate children and watching a guy in a hat with bells on it strum the lute. Starting in junior high I read about them a lot; among my royal ancestors, my favorite is Eleanor of Aquitaine (played by Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter).

Elizabeth Tudor (who is neither my ancestor nor even my relative) is my favorite monarch and one of my favorite historical figures of all time, in large part because she was a fiery-tempered, strong-willed, intelligent spinster, and I have always claimed an affinity for those. I admit I could never understand how anyone could sympathize with that shallow milktoast Mary Queen of Scots, and my interest in Elizabeth made her mother, Anne Boleyn, sympathetic to me too. I was never a huge fan of Liz's father, Henry VIII--how could I be, given the way he treated his wives?--and I was always glad the Earl of Essex didn't succeed in fomenting a rebellion. I just wish the whole big story didn't involve so many people getting their heads chopped off.

I watch every version of Elizabeth's life I come across. I liked the Cate Blanchett movie Elizabeth because it had Cate Blanchett in it, and saw it a couple of times, but it took so many liberties with facts and accuracy that I couldn't really respect it. (Plus it has Geoffrey Rush in it, and he flat creeps me out.) It's been a while since I saw the 1971 BBC six-part mini-series starring Glenda Jackson, but as I remember, Jackson was awesome! I'm kind of sated as far as "The Life if Liz" goes, but maybe in a few months I'll watch it again and see how it compares to the Mirren version. (Especially since I just discovered that the actress who plays Mary of Scotland is named Vivian Pickles.)

So here are my recommendations: If you like elaborate costume dramas, all these versions of Elizabeth's life have their merits, but I'd start with Helen Mirren. Then Glenda, then Anne-Marie, then Cate, and if you really want to go all out, there's always the Bette Davis version, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. But I'd definitely save it for last.

Posted by Holly at 11:45 AM | Comments (7)

September 3, 2006

Dinah

I finally get around to teaching myself to use the camera I got for Christmas, and what's the first image I post on my blog? That's right:

a picture of my cat.

Posted by Holly at 9:17 AM | Comments (7)

September 2, 2006

Intro to my Sunstone Synopsis, Finally

Yeah, here it is: the day some of you have waited for, and others have dreaded: I'm finally gearing up to offer my report on Sunstone.

I should explain a little about what Sunstone is, since it has become obvious to me that even people with a background in Mormonism aren't quite clear on that.

Sunstone's website states that it is the "sponsor of open forums on Mormon thought and experience." The forum I attend each summer in Salt Lake is a symposium on Mormonism, not a conference. The two words are interchangeable in many regards, but General Conference in Mormonism means something special: it's a big meeting held every six months (the first Sundays in April and October) during which the faithful listen to exhortations from the brethren and reaffirm their commitment to the church by sustaining said brethren.

There's very little of that going on at Sunstone, which is probably one reason that some years ago (10? 15? anyway, before my time) the brethren issued a statement condemning alternative forums, which was, I am told, understood to be a condemnation of Sunstone in particular. Scholars who worked at church institutions were warned that their jobs and their membership could be imperiled by participation in Sunstone. As a result, attendance at the symposium declined sharply.

So you won't find too many conventionally devout Mormons delivering papers at--or even attending--Sunstone. It's not that you won't find any; they're just not the majority. Instead, Sunstone is a place where people from the fringes meet and mingle. For instance, at the plenary session one evening, the opening prayer was given by Susan D. Skoor, an ordained apostle of the Community of Christ (formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the branch started by those Mormons who did not follow Brigham Young to Utah after Joseph Smith was assassinated in Illinois--that's right, they ordain women now, and Apostle Skoor was extremely cool) and the closing prayer was given by a guy whose name I didn't catch but who freaked me out with his peremptory command that the audience stand while he prayed and who (I later learned) is a member of a fundamentalist polygamist offshoot of the church.

You ain't gonna find too many of those sorts offering prayers in mainstream Mormon functions.

I'd guess the majority of attendees are people who still maintain their activity in the church but are fairly unorthodox. (I admit I don't have data to back this assertion up, and I might be wrong, but it seems a reasonable guess.) The next biggest contingent, I imagine, is people like me: cultural Mormons who don't practice but maintain an interest in the religion that was once so important to them. Also in the mix are scholars who are not and never have been Mormon, but who have an academic interest in it. There is also a respectable showing from members of the Community of Christ (which never embraced polygamy), and from polygamist groups as well (which never stopped).

The only group not represented is any group that has as its raison d'etre convincing people to leave the Mormon church, because although Sunstone is most definitely not devoted to Mormon apologetics, its goal is to explore the role Mormonism plays in people's lives, not end that role. At Sunstone, you can voice long and loud the opinion that the church is entirely full of shit; you just can't make it your work to convince everyone else to feel that way too.

More to come.

Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (3)