Even the “soul mate” stuff doesn’t pass for anything but Gospel According To Saturday’s Warrior.

Add to this the shallow characterizations, sloppy research, purple prose and Mary Sue protagonist and you have Epic Fail. Bella and Edward’s relationship is obsessive and sick, not healthy, not egalitarian, and not a relationship anyone should aspire to.

How about some examples I like reading.

I don’t know what a great Mormon novel would be as I’m afraid any bizarre or uncreditable incidents would get the work and author condemned and excommunicated by the church.

You obviously haven’t read some of the Mormon novels I’ve read. *shudders*

I don’t know what a great Mormon novel would be as I’m afraid any bizarre or uncreditable incidents would get the work and author condemned and excommunicated by the church. I doubt that a novel about vampires would constitute what the authorities would consider a great Mormon novel unless blood sucking is an earmark of mormons and I can’t believe that. Personnally I thinks that with only less than 200 years of our own traditions and history it might be early on for such publications to have appeared.

But I’d be more concerned about the take on a novel by the authorities as there might be much in Mormonism’s past that we’d rather deny ever happened or keep closed and secret than have published even in a fictional novel.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=K6f78XSOA1Y

Yeah, I stub my toe on it every time I set foot in the place.

TROLL!

Walter Kirn’s “The Thumbsucker” fits that description. So does Brady Udall’s “The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint.”

Both Kirn and Udall are inactive or former Mormons (I prefer “Cultural Mormons”), and neither is writing for a Mormon audience. I liked and would recommend both books.

“Edgar Mint” reminds me a little bit of a John Irving novel, like A Prayer For Owen Meany or The World According to Garp. But even better than Edgar Mint is Udall’s short story collection, “Letting Loose the Hounds.” (Brady Udall is part of the Morris Udall and Stewart Udall clan, a grand-nephew, I think.)

Kirn’s The Thumbsucker was adapted into a movie. The movie was okay, but it excised much of the Mormon content. Read the book instead.

In art appreciation classes at the Y, we did look at paintings that included nudes simply because you can’t really have a passing knowledge of art without knowing some of these works by sight, and they were on the test. I do recall different reactions from professors in the English department over various reading assignments. One professor was extremely apologetic about D.H. Lawrence (and we read the tamest D.H.L. there is). There was a visiting professor teaching post-modern British literature, and those assignments included by far the raciest stuff I read at BYU. The problem is and was that anything written after a certain era is going to deal frankly with sexuality. The times, they are a-changin’.

And if a post-it note is the only thing between you and a Caligula-style orgy, well, that’s not much self-restraint.

Still, there are countless examples of extreme reaction against nudity and immodest dress on campus. For example, students have been known to cover pictures on the covers of magazines and journals with post-its and such to prevent inadvertent temptation. I fear this is evidence of some of that superficiality that Hawkgrrrl talks about above. Or is it public service?

I think Mormons are willing to recognize very, very slim exceptions when it comes to nudity. Namely, your spouse and cadavers. But not much beyond that!

I’m not really using hyperbole, actually. When I was at the Y, I had a co-worker who was a pre-med student. He told me that a guest speaker who had worked in plastic surgery once gave a presentation in one of his classes. During the course of the presentation, he showed a few photos of female breasts (apparently he was illustrating something with regard to breast augmentation surgeries). At this point, several students got up and left the classroom. Apparently the “nudity in the name of medicine” exception is pretty narrow.

Another example is the BYU art museum’s banning of Rodin’s The Kiss. Sure, the sculpture involves nudity and maybe even a teensy bit of eroticism, but is it obscene? Not by a long shot.

I once perused the entire BYU art museum, and I think I saw one uncovered female nipple. It belonged to a Native American woman in a painting. BYU apparently has more lax standards when it comes to Native Americans–think of the near-naked statue between the Harold B. Lee Library and the new Joseph F. Smith Building.

(For what it’s worth, China saw a similar phenomenon in the 1980s, when the government relaxed its controls on the art world and nude painting became popular (it just so happens that I’ve been researching Chinese obscenity law of late). Many of the early nude works did not involve Han Chinese, but rather, ethnic minorities. These groups were seen as less civilized, which apparently excused their nudity. The same thing might be going on at BYU.)

Steve M – “I think it comes down to Mormons’ inability to separate nudity from sexuality from pornography.” And yet, the cadavers in the Widtsoe building are nude. So, doctors + nudity = okay, but artists + nudity = Caligula style orgy? Or is it that art is denigrated for its lack of usefulness (a point supported by the seeming preference for crafts over art in the LDS church)? Or is it okay to look at dead nudes, just not live ones (implying that it’s not the nudity but its potential for action)?

warno – “I wonder if Mormonism is still too insular and idiosyncratic to lend its story to revealing universal truths. . . Are there discussions about the great Adventist novel? The great Jehovah’s Witness novel? Even the Pentecostal movement would be a more appropriate benchmark for Mormonism than Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Protestant christianity.” I think you are onto something here.

Annon. – OK, you are spot on that Dutcher is not exactly an example of art. But given his own statements about his journey, it was a launch point for that question about doubt and apostasy, which I think is a valid question for Mormon artists. To your point about Dutcher’s aims, martyrdom is a time-honored aspiration of both religionists and artists alike. I think the point about religion being a foundation for art is valid for much of history, but current artistic disciplines are so far removed from that it becomes easy to forget. Art itself is so different, and as I said, in many ways it is a replacement for religion to the artist. Food for thought, though, so thanks for your insights.