Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman contains the following paragraph near the end: “An eagle-eyed reader will have noticed that the word creativity appears in this book as little as possible. This is because the word carries too much Romantic baggage — the mystery of inspiration, the claims of genius. I have sought to eliminate some [...]
Last month, Seth Godin wrote a post that both illuminates and complicates the realities for Mormon arts and culture. He outlines what he calls the passion/pop curve (make sure you click on the figure in the post to make it bigger so you can actually read it). The curves live on two axes — the [...]
Last year I purchased a bound volume of the 1949 issues of the missionary magazine of the Argentine and Uruguayan missions, El Mensajero Deseret, which I found in the basement of Sam Weller’s in Salt Lake City. I had hoped that I might find there some articles originally written in Spanish by local members (not [...]
A comparison of the imagery in Russell Holt’s Lamb of God (1993) and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004).
“I do not look forward to the feelings that will grip my heart when The Passion suspends me in time and space and brings me to the feet of the suffering Christ. But it is [...]
After my recent look at different Bible translations, I crunched some additional numbers about the possibility of a market for LDS Books in Spanish, and I’m more convinced than ever that we are ready to see the market develop, once the content is available.
It may even be obvious that this market is likely to start [...]
Last week on the NPR radio program On The Media, in a segment titled “Vanishing Reviews,” I heard a great story from Steve Wasserman, a past editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. It seems that Wasserman had been told by Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes that his ignorance of an early Mexican writer and [...]
Kent and I have been hitting the “issues facing Mormon publishing and book/film selling” pretty hard over the past few weeks. And there is more to come — I recently finished reading Rapture Ready! and have a few things to say about it in relation to the Mormon market. But I don’t want to lose [...]
In my view there are two conflicting strains of advice for authors regarding what they should write. One, which I’ll call the “write what you know” advice, claims that writers are most successful when they write about what they know intimately. Authors need to know a subject before they write, according to this advice.
The other [...]
When I read literary nature or science writing or writing about Earth stewardship, I measure its effectiveness, first, by whether or not the langauge is engaging enough to rouse my sensibilities, and second, by whether or not the writing discusses human behavior toward this planet in creative yet responsible ways. Thus I appraise a writer’s [...]