I’m proud to announce that the first issue of my new magazine, Mormon Artist is now available!
I’ve been working on this for the last two months, though a lot of the work got done today (I’ve been working on it for eleven hours now — next issue, I’m going to plan things better so I don’t have to do this).
The web version is okay, but I recommend the PDF, which looks a lot better and has more pictures to boot. But the choice is yours. (There’s a print version that’ll be available via MagCloud.com once I get the proof copy back and make sure everything’s okay. I’m guessing it’ll take a week or so.)
Back in May, I decided to start digitizing the Welsh Book of Mormon (Llyfr Mormon), dubbing the endeavor Project Cymru. It was going along pretty well for a while, but then I got bogged down over the summer and kind of forgot about the project. I did (and still do) have two volunteers helping me, so we made some headway, but overall the project’s been hibernating.
Not for much longer, though. I’m working on getting a spit-and-barbed-wire version of Unbindery up soon so we can do the OCR clean-up easily, and even get more people to help out. Once that happens, it won’t take long to finish the text. And then I’ll be typesetting it into three different versions: one similar to the original Welsh text, one versified (ala the Doubleday edition of the English Book of Mormon), and a parallel English-Welsh text.
I went up to campus this afternoon for a few hours, and while I was up there I decided to try sticking around for Orson Scott Card’s “1001 Ideas in an Hour” session at LTUE.
The most interesting part to me was at the very end, when one of the attendees asked, “How many revisions do you do?”
Card said, “When I type the last word of the last chapter for the first time, I send it to my publisher.” That’s right. No revisions. He went on to say that he will start a piece over several times until he gets it right, but after that it’s a straight shot without any tweaking.
His rationale, he said, was that the first draft is always the most alive, even if it’s a little ragged. But so many people polish and smooth their drafts until they’re sparkling little gems which are absolutely dead.
It’s an interesting thought, one that took me rather by surprise, but I can see where he’s coming from. I’ll have to try it with my own work and see if that’s what happens.
I’ve been reading C.S. Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer lately, and I came across this passage which really spoke to me:
It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good. Do you know what I mean? On every level of our life…we are always harking back to some occasion which seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by comparison. But these other occasions, I now suspect, are often full of their own new blessing, if only we would lay ourselves open to it. God shows us a new facet of the glory, and we refuse to look at it because we’re still looking for the old one. And of course we don’t get that. You can’t, at the twentieth reading, get again the experience of reading Lycidas for the first time. But what you do get can be in its own way as good….
It would be rash to say that there is any prayer which God never grants. But the strongest candidate is the prayer we might express in the single word encore….
And the joke, or tragedy, of it all is that these golden moments in the past, which are so tormenting if we erect them into a norm, are entirely nourishing, wholesome, and enchanting if we are content to accept them for what they are, for memories. Properly bedded down in a past which we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite growths. Leave the bulbs alone, and the new flowers will come up. Grub them up and hope, by fondling and sniffing, to get last year’s blooms, and you will get nothing. “Unless a seed die…”
A month and a half ago I went to my first New Play Project performance, in the courtyard of the JFSB here on campus. It was fairly low-key, with just one row of audience members. I wasn’t expecting much. But I was surprised. The plays were short — roughly ten minutes each — and yet they still made a difference. The short story of theatre, if you will. After the performance they passed around a clipboard asking for people to write down their email and whether they were interested in volunteering, whether that be with playwriting or directing or acting or what have you. I decided then and there to write a play. And nothing happened. (This is not uncommon in my life.)
A month later, I went to their “Roots” festival, and again I felt compelled to write something and submit it. That was a Friday, and the deadline for the Religious Plays submissions was the following Tuesday. Saturday morning, an idea popped into my head, and right away I sat down and wrote out a six-page draft.
After getting feedback from friends and revising it pretty much every day over that weekend, I sent in my latest draft and crossed my fingers. Now, since this was my first play, I wasn’t expecting much. In fact, I was kind of hoping they’d reject it, because I didn’t really know what to do if they did accept it.
Shortly after that the script selection committee met and decided to provisionally accept it, which meant they’d give me two weeks to revise it; if it was good enough at the end of those two weeks, they’d produce it. So I took their feedback and started rewriting.
At the end of the first week, I went to their workshop (they hold one every Wednesday night) with my newest draft and prepared to be flayed alive. I didn’t really know anything about playwriting, after all — I’ve watched scores of plays, but that doesn’t make one a playwright. But I was pleasantly surprised. We read the play aloud (they had me cast my actor-readers) and then spent an hour discussing it. Even though my play needed lots of work, getting the critiques wasn’t really painful at all, and I came out energized and excited for those revisions.
After that, I had till last night to make my revisions so that the script selection committee could make their final decision. Up until the second-to-last draft, I wasn’t sure I was even in the ballpark — it felt like every change I made was making the play worse. After all, eight drafts had burrowed me so far into the play that I felt I couldn’t really get out and see it objectively.
But I’m pleased to announce that an hour ago I got an e-mail saying I made the cut. The play will be performed October 11, 12, and 13 at 7 p.m. each night in the Bullock Room at the Provo City Library. (It’s part of a set entitled Thorns & Thistles, and the other plays are really good, too.)
As it happens, auditions for all four plays are tonight and tomorrow night from 7 to 9 p.m., so if you’re interested, please audition! (And if you know anyone who might be interested, pass the info on.) Tonight’s auditions will be somewhere on campus — once they get a room, they’ll post it on the board outside the Nelke Theater in the HFAC. Tomorrow’s auditions will be in the Bullock Room on the third floor of the Provo Library.
The only people for me, are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
From Erik Routley’s bit in C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences, as found on The Inklings:
I know myself what others know far better — how unfailingly courteous Lewis was in answering letters. I think I corresponded with him on three or four occasions… But there was a reply every time — it might be quite brief, but it was always written for you and for nobody else. I think this was his greatest secret. He hated casual contacts; human contact must, for him, be serious and concentrated and attentive, or it was better avoided. It might be for a moment only, but that was its invariable quality. That is not only why so many people have precious memories of him; it is also why he couldn’t write three words without the reader’s feeling that they were written for him and him alone. It’s why his massive books of scholarship read as delightfully as his children’s stories, and why he’s one of the few preachers who can be read without losing their message.
Last night at ward prayer one of our Relief Society presidents (there are two) read this quote by Parley P. Pratt:
“An intelligent being, in the image of God, possesses every organ, attribute, sense, sympathy, affection, of will, wisdom, love, power and gift, which is possessed by God himself. But these are possessed by man in his rudimental state in a subordinate sense of the word. Or, in other words, these attributes are in embryo, and are to be gradually developed. They resemble a bud, a germ, which gradually develops into bloom, and then, by progress, produces the mature fruit after its own kind. The gift of the Holy Spirit adapts itself to all these organs or attributes. It quickens all the intellectual faculties, increases, enlarges, expands, and purifies all the natural passions and affections, and adapts them by the gift of wisdom to their lawful use. It inspires, develops, cultivates, and matures all the fine-toned sympathies, joys, tastes, kindred feelings, and affections of our nature. It inspires virtue, kindness, goodness, tenderness, gentleness, and charity. It develops beauty of person, form and features. It tends to health, vigor, animation, and social feeling. It develops and invigorates all the faculties of the physical and intellectual man. It strengthens, invigorates, and gives tone to the nerves. In short, it is, as it were, marrow to the bone, joy to the heart, light to the eyes, music to the ears, and life to the whole being. In the presence of such person, one feels to enjoy the light of their countenances, as the genial rays of a sunbeam. Their very atmosphere diffuses a thrill, a warm glow of pure gladness and sympathy, to the heart and nerves of others who have kindred feelings, or sympathy of spirit.” — Key to Theology, pp. 96-97.
I’ve read this quote many a time before, but in the past I just glanced over it, seeing it as a nice list of things but not really paying attention to it. Hearing it read aloud made quite a difference, and it quickly earned a spot as one of my favorite quotes ever.
Got an e-mail today from the Mormon Artists Group announcing a new book called On the Road With Joseph Smith. It is “Richard Lyman Bushman’s private account of the events surrounding the publication of his great work, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling,” and one of the excerpts was striking:
August 9, 2005
[In response to a Presbyterian critic’s query about believing scholarship]
I wish I could strike a responsive chord in Christians like you. We wonder why all Christians don’t understand that we believe in the Book of Mormon on the basis of a spiritual witness. It is very hard for a Mormon to believe that Christians accept the Bible because of the scholarly evidence confirming the historical accuracy of the work. Surely there are uneducated believers whose convictions are not rooted in academic knowledge. Isn’t there some kind of human, existential truth that resonates with one’s desires for goodness and divinity? And isn’t that ultimately why we read the Bible as a devotional work? We don’t have to read the latest issues of the journals to find out if the book is still true. We stick with it because we find God in its pages or inspiration, or comfort, or scope. That is what religion is about in my opinion, and it is why I believe the Book of Mormon. I can’t really evaluate all the scholarship all the time; while I am waiting for it to settle out I have to go on living. I need some good to hold on to and to lift me up day by day. The Book of Mormon inspires me, and so I hold on. Reason is too frail to base a life on. You can be whipped about by all the authorities with no genuine basis for deciding for yourself. I think it is far better to go where goodness lies.
I keep thinking other Christians are in a similar position but they don’t agree. They keep insisting their beliefs are based on reason and evidence. I can’t buy that — the resurrection as rational fact? And so I am frankly as perplexed about Christian belief as you are about Mormons. Educated Christians claim to base their belief on reason when I thought faith was the teaching of the scriptures. You hear the Good Shepherd’s voice, and you follow it.
I guess we could go on and on. I hope I am telling you the truth about myself. The fact is I am a believer and I can’t help myself. I couldn’t possibly give it up; it is too delicious.
Yesterday morning I was thinking about sparklines and how they might be used in genealogy, and after a few quick sketches I came up with this:
Here’s how it works for individuals: the first black dot is their birth. Each pixel is one year. The final dot is their death. Any middle dots are the person’s marriage(s). It’s nice because you can see at a glance how long they lived (in comparison to others), whether they married early or late (and how many times), and so on.
For families, the first dot is the marriage year. The last is the year the second parent died or a divorce year, whichever comes first. Any dots in between are children. Again, it provides a lot of information in a small space — how long they were married, how many children and how they were spaced, etc.
I originally thought of using different colors for the various dots (you can see a glimmer of this in the family sparkline for Tom & Jane Smith), but I’m now thinking it’d be better to leave them monochromatic so that they can still carry all the information when printed/displayed in black and white. (The line could be black instead of grey, of course.) Once the rules are understood (what each dot means), there’s no need for colors to differentiate them.
You could also use these when writing family histories:
If including them inline isn’t your style, you could always use footnotes or sidenotes:
I’m in the middle of figuring out if there’s a good, compact way to represent one’s ancestors via sparklines. I’ll post again if I come up with anything. Oh, and I haven’t written any code to generate these genealogy sparklines yet, but soon…
