Well, I'm sitting in the airport waiting to head back to Sacramento after another fun and eventful Salt Lake Sunstone Symposium.
On Friday I presented my paper, "Sacred Sci-Fi: The Fiction of Orson Scott Card as Mormon Mythmaking." Those who are interested in a short summary of it might want to check out Michael DeGroote's summary over at MormonTimes. Thanks to Michael for his very fair and favorable rendering. My only complaints are that he implied I think Card "hid" Mormonism in his writings (which I do not), and he didn't clearly state my "mischievous thesis": namely, that Orson Scott Card is a truer successor to Joseph Smith than Thomas Monson. I am quite happy with how my paper turned out, and the reactions to it seemed to all be pretty positive. I'd like to do a little more reading and revision, and then try to get it published.
The best part of Sunstone is always meeting and chatting with people. I spent a lot of my time with Mike Reed and Seth Bryant. Wednesday night we went for a drink. Only at Sunstone do you spend all day talking about Mormon stuff and then go drinking afterward. Thursday night we went for dinner, and on the way back we heard Michael Jackson's "Beat It" playing loudly in the distance. We followed the noise and found a grunge rock concert with hundreds of underage high school kids milling around drinking, smoking marijuana, and moshing in front of a stage on which some guys in ugly rubber alien suits were dancing around like morons, possibly making obscene gestures (though I didn't have a good view so I might be wrong about that). Mike took pictures, so if I can get them I'll post them. Suffice to say, it was not what I expected to find in downtown Salt Lake City!
I also got to meet and chat with plenty of (relatively) famous folks I hadn't met before: Mike Ash, Robin and Emily Jensen, D. Michael Quinn, three Community of Christ apostles, C. H. Hanson, Bored in Vernal, structurecop, John Hamer, and plenty of others I'm not remembering right now. And then there were the old favorites, like Don Bradley, Dan Vogel, Sandra Tanner, Ron Huggins, Maxine Hanks, Kevin Barney, Ellen Decoo, Matt Bowman. By the way, if you've never seen Matt get excited about something, you need to have him tell you about Mormon Bigfoot legends. It starts as a rising crescendo of vigorous hand-waving, so stand far enough back not to get hit. In the next stage he gets up and crouches on his chair like a frog, and then it peaks when he just can't stay seated any more and he has to stand up so he can hop and dance a little. It's hilariously wonderful. This is why Matt is on track to be a first-rate scholar, and I'm on track to be a second-rate one. The only time I get that excited about anything is... well, ok, never. But certainly not about my research.
There were lots of really interesting presentations, a few of which I may undertake to summarize at some point in the next couple days. Unfortunately I have a bad habit of setting things down and forgetting where I laid them, and my notebook and pencil were among the things that went AWOL this week. So if I do any summarizing it will have to be from memory. I'll also try to post a few pictures once I get them transferred from my camera to my hard drive.
1 comments:
I am actually going to be giving a paper on relating to Card as a historian at West Georgia in November. I will be talking about the society building issue, which you seem to have touched on, and the Speaker for the Dead.
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