Here' s what happens a lot: I'll be in a discussion of the Gospel and the Arts, or Literature, or Music or Theatre or whatever, and the same binary comes up.  There are two kinds of art: 'worldly' art and 'spiritual' art.   We're to avoid the one and embrace the other.  Art can invoke the Spirit, but art can also offend the Spirit.  Art can embrace darkness or light.  If we realize the movie we're watching is 'worldly' (the word we mostly use is 'inappropriate'), we should walk out of the theater, turn off the DVD player.  Walk out. Leave.  Erase that song from your I-Pod, turn that book back in to the library, leave the museum.  We're in the world, but we're not of the world.  We should follow a higher standard.  Those are the metaphors: light and dark, up and down.  We even have all those wacky object lessons we remember so fondly from Seminary or Sunday school.  My favorite is the dog poop brownie one.  A teacher brings in some brownies--ask the kids if they want one.  Mentions, oh so casually, that they're really good brownies, except for just a little dog poop that got in the bowl.  Of course, nobody wants them then.  Well, isn't that what we do when we see a movie, say, with just that one inappropriate scene.  Aren't we polluting our minds and spirits, just like we'd be polluting our bodies if we ate those brownies? 

I'm mocking the binary here, and I shouldn't.  It's grounded in real concerns--about offending the Spirit, about keeping our kids safe, about not becoming desensitized to violence or the commodified sexism of way too much popular culture. 

But I still don't like it, and I wish we could come up with something better.  Here at BYU, we had planned to do a production of Troilus and Cressida. The powers-that-be said no.  It's a play, they said, that just doesn't have enough light in it, that partakes too much in darkness.  Not appropriate for BYU.  We're doing Romeo and Juliet instead, because, you know, teen sex and suicide have a lot more, just, light goin' on in 'em. It's easy to make the administrator who made this decision seem like an idiot, but I know who made it, and he's not an idiot at all; he's a bright guy and a good guy, responding to real pressures and concerns.  But still, the idea that one play has qualities inherent in the work itself that automatically renders it more welcoming to the Spirit, and that another play lacks such qualities, again inherent in the language and structure of the play itself; well, that's a pretty silly and indefensible argument, especially for a live art form like theatre.

In fact, our experiences with the Spirit are subjective, individual, unique.  It's entirely possible for me to feel the Spirit in a theater very powerfully, and for someone else to find the same work on the same night offensive and spiritually damaging.  The Lord works with each of us differently, according to our needs and difficulties and experiences. 

I just reject it.  I don't think there exists such a thing as worldly art.  I think there's just art, and it speaks to some people and it doesn't speak to other people.  I think the whole binary, in fact, encourages an entirely negative aesthetic, where we judge books or plays or music or movies on what they don't have.  "That was a good movie. It had no nudity or violence, and just a little bad language."  I think that's an approach to art that reduces the Gospel to checklists and proscriptions. And at its worst, it promotes a very unhealthy power dynamic--it promotes unrighteous dominion.  I say Troilus and Cressida is inappropriate because I'm your boss, and that means my spirituality is the one that counts, that matters. In fact, there's rather a famous talk on the Arts and the Spirit of the Lord that reduces to that argument, and to nothing else.

And as a teacher, I really really really hate the binary.  I've seen it damage too many kids' lives.  Kids major in Theatre because they've fallen in love with an art form.  They come to us, and learn some skills and some craft, and then they graduate.  And they fall in love even more.  And then they see something, a play, a movie.  It's wonderful.  They love it even more because they understand it better.  But it's worldly.  It has some stuff--some language, some nudity maybe.  And they decide they have to choose, between the art form they love and this institution which declares (they think) that love invalid.  And where do they get the idea that the play or movie or book they love is 'worldly?'  Well, from all those Sunday School lessons and sacrament meeting talks on the dangers of 'worldliness.'  Their culture DOES suggest that they're wrong for loving the art they love.  Because of that 'worldly' v. 'spiritual' binary. 

I want a new paradigm.  I want us to get away from all that neo-Platonic dualism.  I want us to talk about the Spirit differently than we do, not interpolate one person's subjective experience into a rule for how it functions.  I don't know how to do it though. 

So . . . any thoughts?  I have more questions than answers here.  But I do know I'm going to keep eating those brownies.  I don't think there's poop in 'em, for me.

Irreantum Fiction Contest Winners

The Association for Mormon Letters is pleased to announce the winners of the 2010 Irreantum fiction contest. A committee of judges considered 91 entries and awarded three cash prizes and two honorable mentions. More...

The following is adapted from something I wrote several years ago for a writer friend of mine, and I thought it might be interesting to post here.

As analogies go, it may or may not work for everyone, but what the heck?

A certain publisher has a contract available to anyone who wants to agree to it.  This contract offers a thousand-figure payment for a book that has to have very specific things in it.  Anyone, no matter how little talent or writing skill, may write a book and submit it according to this contract, and as long as those things are in the book, and the author did the very best he or she could, the book will be accepted. More...

As a deal lawyer, I have written, argued about, revised and finalized contracts for a living for the last 22 years. The irony is, the more experience I have, the greater my fear of making a mistake. I'm afraid of typographical errors. What if I write 1.00% instead of 10.00%, as the interest rate, especially when hurried by a bank client to get a deal closed with some last minute changes?  Another thing I dread is to leave out a certain paragraph that is supposed to be in a particular kind of deal. I have bolted out of bed at 3:00 in the morning, gone downstairs and hooked up remotely to the office just to make sure I remembered to put in a promissory note signed just the day before a certain sentence that the bank needed to protect itself against some future harm. Perhaps the worst anxiety I have is I'll make a more subtle mistake, that I'll write something that everyone at the time thought was clear, but that 2 years later, read cold on a Monday morning in the bright light of day, is, well, not so clear, but in fact ambiguous in light of a recent event that this contract provision was supposed to cover.  I've come to believe that the written word is born in its own kind of original sin, that it is prone to waywardness and corruption, often regardless of our best intentions. More...

I'm a firm believer that to be a good writer, you must read, and read a lot. I don't read nearly as fast as many people do, but I manage to get in 60 - 70 books a year. 

Sometimes people ask what I read. Other times they assume what I read. Whenever I answer either side of the question, the person on the other side seems surprised. 

Some people assume I read only LDS fiction. That one surprises me. Why would I read only this market? Sure, there's a lot of great stuff in it, and a variety of genres, but I'm not sure why they think I don't read other things just because I publish in this market. More...

At some point, we all have to come to grips with the fact that Pride & Prejudice & Zombies sold 100 million copies--and we didn't write it. Such is the lot of the creative writer in the era of the mashup, when concept is king. You and I have to sleep nights despite the persistent feeling that each random, insane idea we've casually discarded might actually have been worth a fortune, especially if said insane idea involved plagiarizing one or more public domain works.

I must admit that I've resorted to snobbery to protect my fragile ego. "Sure," I tell myself, "I don't have a half-plagiarized work gracing the displays of most major bookstores. But I didn't want to be rich and famous anyway" (beep beep goes thelie detector, but I ignore it and press on) "I want to write something really important and moving, something that says a lot more than you can say with a dead British woman's words and a little B-movie make-up."

But oh! how my comfort has been shattered since I picked up Plagues & Prejudice (& Zombies), a graphic novel by B. M. Brar which retells the Exodus with upperclass British zombies as the Egyptians. More...

Annette and I have this show we like to watch--the Inspector Lynley mysteries.  I gather it was popular on PBS a couple of years back, but we discovered it via Netflix.  It's about a British aristocrat-turned-detective, Inspector Lynley, and his lower class partner, Sgt. Barbara Havers. So there's all this British class system stuff, the nuances of which probably escape us. Nathaniel Parker plays Lynley, and we honestly don't like him that much, especially in the third season, when he got a new hair style that somehow made him act like a total prat, instead of just looking like one.  But we love Sharon Small, who plays Havers. More...

I just finished reading well over 100 entries to Irreantum's fiction and creative nonfiction contests, narrowing them down to a set of semifinalists over which our contest committee can wrangle.  Reading all those stories and essays can be a bit of a slog, it's true.  But it's also one of my favorite things to do as Irreantum's editor.  (In fact, I like to do it so much that I'm staying on as Irreantum's contest coordinator after stepping down as editor at the end of this year.)

One of the reasons I enjoy it is because I'm a great lover of stories---stories of both the true and made up variety---and it thrills me to see story after story after story, each one original in its own way, being made about Mormon experience.  Some of these stories are better told than others, it's true, but even the most amateur entry contains a kernel of a tale.  And the best stories?  (And there are some really good ones this year, I'm pleased to say.)  The best ones kept me glued to my computer screen, had me wiping away tears, helped me yearn or thrill or discover right along with the protagonist. More...

Louise Plummer talks about how lists can provide inspiration for writers, and has exercises and mini-workshops in which list-making is the focus.

My mother told me every so often that the great thing about lists is when you can check things off of them.  It gives such a feeling of accomplishment.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812, is an eye-opening read about a diary that is essentially a list.  The diary has been known to historians for years, but until Ulrich looked at it in a different way, it was considered uninteresting to say the least.

So can lists really be considered literature?  I submit that they can certainly be considered a means of insight into culture, even if it is only the one-person culture of the list-maker. More...

Yesterday my family painted two newly finished rooms in our basement (one a bedroom, the other my new office). More...