From: owner-aml-list-digest@lists.xmission.com (aml-list-digest) To: aml-list-digest@lists.xmission.com Subject: aml-list-digest V2 #92 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 Thursday, June 26 2003 Volume 02 : Number 092 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 12:31:48 -0600 From: "Brown" Subject: Re: [AML] HOWARD-JOHNSON, Carolyn _Harkening_ (Review) Whoops, not two books called The Harkening! The first book is called This is the Place! Thanks! Cheers! Marilyn - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 16:11:00 -0600 From: "Clark Goble" Subject: RE: [AML] (Des News) Dutcher _Joseph_ project ___ Clark ___ | After a run-in with a character inspired I believe by F. | Scott Fitzgerald he finally gets his script | ___ Tony ___ | I always could have sworn that this was a thinly disguised | spoof of William Faulkner during his Hollywood years. Let's | call the Cohens and ask them. ___ Was Faulkner's wife in the asylum like Fitzgerald's? _Barton Fink_ makes a big deal of the author's wife being in an asylum in France. I know there was always controversy over Fitzgerald's writings and authorship. (Including his sabotaging his wife's writing when she went out on her own) Further Fitzgerald went to Hollywood when 41 after he couldn't publish anymore. His last years were as a screenwriter for MGM. He wrote _Madam Curie_, _Maries Antoinette_, _Three Comrades_ and other obscure films I'd never heard of. The woman who is killed in _Barton Fink_ is semi-based on Sheilah Graham http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/biography.html [Clark Goble] - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 17:56:36 -0600 From: "Annette Lyon" Subject: Re: [AML] BARBER, Brad _Troy Through A Window_ (Review) To say that the church is accepting and supportive o= f a=20 homosexual orientation is at best na=EFve. I didn't say that. I said that the Church's hard line on morality doesn't exclude a person who is homosexual. Practicing it *would* cross the line--as any sexual behavior outside of a marriage would (do I have to define that word to be clear? Okay, marriage between a man and a woman, as ordained by God.) The law of chastity is one of the biggies in TR interviews, one of the biggie covenants made in the temple, and it applies to everyone, regardless of who they are attracted to. I know there are lots of people struggling with SSA members, and they have huge hurtles in the Church. I'm not disputing that. I am saying that anyone (or any literary work, for that matter) is shallow if they claim that a homosexual must either say "accept me sleeping with my partner or reject me." There's a very big middle ground in between that *Troy* doesn't seem to address. Help me out here, Rex! You've nagivated these waters and remained faithful to gospel principles. Annette Lyon - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 17:48:07 -0500 From: Jonathan Langford Subject: re: [AML] BARBER, Brad _Troy Through A Window_ (Review) In response to the original phrase: >"Troy is very capable of seeing the Church's hard line on morality as >being necessarily exclusive of his sexual orientation." Annette commented: >Or rather, it is necessarily exclusive of *practicing* his orientation. BIG >difference. To which I in turn respond: Well, yes, sort of. But in this case, I think the original statement is still true. (By the way, I've now read Annette's reply to another message and don't think we're necessarily in disagreement about what we're saying, ultimately. A semantic difference, perhaps. But I think it's an important point anyway, so I'm going to go ahead and say it...) The Church doesn't condemn someone for homosexual feelings. But it does view these as essentially, radically temporary, and fundamentally mistaken. A disorder, or a distortion or misinterpretation of the way things ought to be. The Church's teachings do not accept a homosexual orientation as an essential part of someone's character, but rather as something to be endured, with an eye to permanent change and healing. There are no homosexual couples in heaven. Every individual, so far as I can tell, is meant to be either heterosexual or asexual in the eternities. There may be some tiny minority of believing church members that take a different view of this issue. Still, I think that what I just stated is a very fair statement of the Church's official position, as reflected in the Handbook of Instruction, and of the position of a vast majority of believing LDS. I mention this, not because I want to debate the Church's position on this issue, but because--if we're writing about SSA individuals in the Church, whether real or fictional--it is essential, I think, that we recognize the situation they are in. Which includes, at a fundamental doctrinal level (at least as the doctrine is currently interpreted), a rejection of homosexual orientation. You can't believe that homosexual orientation, as generally defined, is a basic part of you and at the same time accept the Church's teachings. The problem represented by Troy and his family seems irreducible. During a mutual dream scene in _Angels in America_, Harper (the neurotic Valium-addicted wife of...well, anyway) introduces herself as a Mormon. Prior (another character) then introduces himself as a homosexual, and Harper responds, "Oh! In my church we don't believe in homosexuals." It's meant to be humorous, but I've wondered whether Kushner really knew what he was saying. Because in a real way, we Mormons *don't* believe in homosexuals. We reject the very existence of the category. Which means that SSA individuals in the Church, while not condemned for their feelings, are not really free to accept those feelings either, at least in any obvious or direct way. Jonathan Langford Speaking for myself, not AML-List jlangfor@pressenter.com - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2003 10:13:48 -0600 From: "Eugene Woodbury" Subject: Re: [AML] (Des News) Dutcher _Joseph_ project Combining thoughts from two threads [see: Revising Original Works], my advice to Richard would be this: Box it up, park it in a corner of the attic, and forget about it for a decade or two. This is one of those projects, like Scorsese's Gangs of New York, or Mel Gibson's The Passion, that is resistant to time. It doesn't need to be done *now*. Even Lucas let 16 years lapse between Star Wars III and IV. Okay, he didn't improve any as a director or writer (maybe got worse), but it meant he could do the movies on his own terms, which probably let him sleep better at night. I recently watched again a documentary about Clint Eastwood, and the clear theme throughout was that he started out doing the movies he *had* to do, so he could eventually get around to doing the movies he *wanted* to do. Sometimes the two happily ended up on the same side of the ledger sheet--more and more often as he piled up experience as a director and actor. But he had to make a lot of the former to get to the point when studios would hand over the big bucks for the latter. Eastwood's hardly alone when it comes to this type of artistic pragmatism. William Faulkner wrote a bunch of screenplays during the 1930s and 1940s as a staff studio scribe (most notably, To Have and Have Not). Spielberg did Jurassic Park so he could do Schindler's List. Gibson's multi-million dollar fee for Mad Max IV will no doubt help him pay for The Passion. I think Gibson is the case in point, a conservative (even reactionary) Catholic who hasn't abandoned common sense when it comes to the realities of Hollywood financing. If people want to pay him a whole truckload of money to make Lethal Weapon III or Mad Max IV, as long as he's not required to sell his soul in the process (MM 3 was a pale imitation compared to MM2, as were LW 2 and 3 compared to the original, but I didn't detect any soul-selling, just grown men having way too much fun blowing things up), then he'll come up with plenty of good things (as far as he is concerned) to do with cash, like make a movie about Christ that will never make back its costs. At any rate, nobody's made a "major motion picture" about Joseph Smith for a couple generations at least (Vincent Price, wasn't it, in the role?), and even the official church biopics have been pretty wretched, so no competition there, either. More importantly is why. I think Clark's discussion of Frailty suggests the reason, and it's not an artistically pleasant one. More specifically, it's a problem of cognitive dissonance. Yeah, sure, we'd all like to see a "good" movie made about Joseph Smith--in the hypothetical. But are we really going to want to watch the final product when it's not the version we play in our heads? And for the investor: when a frown from a well-placed stake president or GA or Deseret News reviewer could sink the whole ship? I don't just mean "we" as individuals, but "we" as a church. Gibson's travails making The Passion are instructive, as is the flak Scorsese caught for Last Temptation of Christ. The same will be magnified several fold (along the "Mormon Corridor") if and when someone attempts something other than a hagiographic account of Joseph Smith. In fact, I would go this far in declaring (same goes also for that great Book of Mormon movie somebody's always promising to make): it's not ever going to happen, not unless like The Passion it can be self-financed, and you can suffer the slings and arrows that will inevitably fly your way. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I don't see it happening in the foreseeable future. Most people--meaning most Mormons--don't know much more about the life of Joseph Smith than what's they're told in Sunday School. A successful biopic--reaching a larger and more diverse and non-Mormon audience than any of the many respected biographies to date--would thus become by default the given interpretation of the Prophet to which the church would have to answer. This is untenable. I'm not talking in some conspiratorial sense, but in the sense that all organizations must constantly defend against third-party definitions of their central myths (speaking not in terms of fact or fiction, but in terms of social and cultural function) that they cannot directly control. A workaround is to take the tangential approach, as Card did in Saints, and make the protagonist someone other than Joseph Smith. In fact, there's the recommended source material: Based on the Novel by Orson Scott Card!!! But even the material in Saints (written by a believing Mormon) would offend the living daylights out of the same people who didn't show up in droves to see Brigham City. Perhaps something more tangential, more allegorical--but get too artsy and those same people won't know what you're talking about. Precisely! Thinking about Orson Scott Card, in fact, the better book is Seventh Son (ditto for the BOM: The Memory of Earth). I know that many Mormons who read it didn't figure out that it was about Joseph Smith until it was pointed out to them. Like I said, as far as conventional biopics go, I still think it's one of those great ideas whose time will never come. Though in a decade or two it might come a lot closer, perhaps when it becomes (if it ever does) acceptable to bring ecumenical--non-Utahn, non-Corporation of the Church--views of Mormonism to the mainstream Mormon table. In the meantime, how about a Mormon version of Mad Max (Card again: The Folk of the Fringe)? Eugene Woodbury - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 18:46:57 -0400 From: Sam Brown Subject: Re: [AML] (Des News) Dutcher _Joseph_ project Hello, I read with considerable interest the newspaper article on Richard's difficulties securing financing for his Joseph Smith film project. It's remarkable to me how much this has been a lightning rod for different approaches to Smith's life and work. As I understand the situation, Richard can't get funding because of fear that he would be too factual, would explore too ably the story of our Prophet. The framing of the question implies that there can be no place between the incomprehensible, angelic savant of F Smith/Fielding Smith/McConkie catechism, and the bloated satyr of Brodie's imagination and the Tanners' regurgitated calumny (had to use that word bc it sounds so strange, and Smith himself loved it so much). (As I write this, I notice that my choice of surname rather than given name places me in controversial places, though my affection and respect for Smith are at a remove of 150 years, and I never quite feel that he is someone I would refer to like an informal mutual acquaintance or a deity in no need of a surname, e.g. Jesus/Joshua.) I for one would vote for missing both extremes. The beauty and grandeur of Joseph Smith and his inspiration and legacy are all the more vital to me in the context of his endless enthusiasm for life, his lack of cynicism, his lack of mechanisms for protecting himself from commercial misadventures and personal betrayal, his capacity to see beyond the confines of Victorian visions of the moral life. While I respect Jonathan Edwards and Augustine (or at least the traditions of the latter that are received today), I thank God in my prayers that they are not the prophets of my religion. In my most spiritual moments, the ineffable experience of God is always rooted in a sensuous vitality that Smith understood in a way few other mystics have or could. I keep telling myself that in twenty years when I am the prose stylist I so hunger to be, I will write Smith's story. I am extremely sympathetic with Richard's desire to tell the story, to give room to such an immensity of emotion, humanity, and spiritual power. I wish him all success in his quest (to quote the grungy voice I heard on the radio a few years ago, "if I had a million dollars," I'd turn it over to him. God bless you, Richard. But I don't know how ready we are for the story to be told, an "agony and ecstasy" of religious creation that doesn't encumber the hero with too little or too much complex humanity. Does anyone know of examples of this? Treatments in fiction of practical and mystical religion, sacred sexuality, experiments in common living? It sounds like something Tolstoy should have written when he got religious instead of the rambling tracts he did write. Many thanks to Richard and his quest for making me think more carefully about this subject. sam - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 17:59:01 -0600 From: Christopher Bigelow Subject: RE: [AML] Next AML Conferences: When? I don't know that any dates have been finalized yet. I'll try to remember to post the dates as soon as they are decided. D. Michael, don't we usually try to hold the writers conf. on the first weekend in Nov? And I think the annual meeting may usually be the last weekend in February. But I wouldn't bank on any of those yet, because something as minor as a BYU football game can affect the scheduling process. Chris Bigelow - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 19:15:51 -0400 From: Sam Brown Subject: [AML] Introductions: Sam Brown Somewhere I read that after a few posts, you're supposed to identify yourself. I also recently received an e-mail off-line that suggested I should do so, and now that I have finished the hardest two years of my life, I think I have the time. My wife Kate Holbrook and I live in Boston with our daughter Amelia. I'm a medical resident (third and final year started this morning!). I'm a third great grandson of Brigham Young by Zina DHJS Young, which I guess explains some of my quirks. I had always been interested in fiction and the essay, but medical school left no time until (on the first day of my first vacation of medical internship, while I was trying to keep a Boy Scout from hurting himself) I managed to break my ankle high on a mountaintop in New Hampshire's White Mountains and I found myself on 4 weeks leave (complicated fracture, complicated operation, all that garbage). After watching 70 movies in 2 weeks (milked NETFLIX for everything it was worth), I picked up my laptop and started writing the fiction I'd been meaning to for a decade. My favorite author is Nabokov. I love Wise Blood, Anna Karenina, Fathers and Sons, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Simpsons (Christopher Ricks has said that it is the greatest contribution to world literature America has made in the last half-century). I love to struggle through the Modernists, largely unsuccessfully. Right now I'm trying to decide what I want to do: be an infectious disease researcher (my work to date is in understanding and controlling outbreaks of infection--a word to the wise: don't import Gambian rats, I mean really, Gambian rats?) or pretend I can be a physician 20 hrs a week and write fiction with the rest of my time. The next two years are the critical period. Reading and connecting with the AML community has been extremely helpful for me, as it's been hard to imagine how Mormonism can integrate into contemporary fiction. You (collectively) have a wonderful vision, and I'm glad to be a part of it, however peripherally. Finally, someone noted that my degree and affiliation were listed on several of my posts. I apologize. I had no interest in snubbing anyone or showing off (a friend from high school signs his name John Doe, G.E.D. to make the point). I don't have a separate personal e-mail account, and the signature is just part of my official correspondence. I will try to remember to delete it, but I may forget occasionally. [MOD: I see no reason to delete a signature that gives additional information about who you are. Change or remove only if change is desired.] sam - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 18:00:27 -0600 From: "Annette Lyon" Subject: Re: [AML] (Des News) Dutcher _Joseph_ project "Preston Sturges' masterpiece, _Sullivan's Travels_ which was, tangentially, provided the germ for _O Brother Where Art Thou_" Actually, the opening credits say that _O Brother Where Art Thou_ is based on the _Odyssey_. Annette Lyon - -- AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature ------------------------------ End of aml-list-digest V2 #92 *****************************