MONOMO

Read Joanna Brooks' new book yesterday, and in the evening followed Stirling Adams' invitation to meet "The Scholar of Moab" at a cabin up the south fork of the Provo River.

The big gibbous moon just past its prime winked in and out from behind the mountains as I drove home in the dark. My thoughts were gibbous as well.

Brooks writes about growing up Mormon, fiercely and tenderly Mormon. There's a chapter about her awakening as a feminist while at BYU, years I was there as well, exciting but ultimately disappointing years during which a good university lost its nerve.

Proposition 8 invades California at the precise moment when Brooks is trying to introduce her daughters to the religion of her grandmothers. She recreates the pioneer day celebration she knew as the girl in the book's cover photo and volunteers for the No-on-8 campaign.

Mormon, so Mormon that it hurts to be Mormon. That's her dilemma.

It's my dilemma too. The password I chose when I got a new computer five years ago, MONOMO, was a declaration of independence from the religion that shaped me. There are a host of reasons for officially leaving the church, including disgust at the campaign against people like my brother John. If they officially attack homosexuals, if they elbow good people out of the church because they speak their minds, if there's a single mold for being a Mormon, then count me out.

MONOMO.

But it's not that easy. The photo of me with four siblings and a cousin takes me back to a childhood like the one Brooks describes, a couple of decades earlier, to be sure, but likewise marked by racism and fear of the communist civil rights movement and a generous determination to build the Kingdom of God and the wonder of BYU with its concentration of other Mormons and the erotically spiritual uplift of youth conferences and a two-year mission in Germany and on and on and on. Beliefs and practices and ideas (the glory of God is intelligence, there should be no poor among you, the natural man is an enemy to god, shall the youth of Zion falter?, keep the Sabbath day holy, come unto Christ and be perfected in him, the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them, and by the power of the Holy Ghost you may know the truth of all things) work in me still, leavened (that too!) by Nietzsche and Thomas Merton and Goethe and Adrienne Rich and all the rest, but still fermenting, for better and worse, in my subterranean self.

And then the evening, dozens of people gathered in the canyon to hear Steve Peck read from his fine satire of Mormons. Old friends from BYU, lively younger BYU people, just the kind of gathering of earnest and smart and curious and talented Mormon human beings I left Vanderbilt for. (Why are you leaving? the Dean of Arts and Sciences asked me, we just awarded you tenure. I miss the scent of sage, I told him, and I'm going back to the university that educates my fellow Mormons.)

Here they were again, my fellow Mormons, in a cabin next door to Gene and Charlotte England's cabin where I spent many such thoughtful evenings in similar groups. But even given the liveliness of the good book and the good food and the good company, I was conflicted—oddly and gratefully conflicted.

Conversations felt constricted. And there were conversations I could have nowhere else.

Friends talked of the church retirement system that kept them from leaving. They lamented that their schools and departments could not hire non-Mormons. They mentioned restrictions on inviting speakers. They spoke of battles they chose not to fight so they could fight others. They lamented conservative politics. They feared a growing fundamentalism among Mormon leaders. They mentioned Gene England and Sam Rushforth and Steven Epperson and Dan Fairbanks and Joanna Brooks.

I couldn't help thinking that a few bottles of good wine would have loosened things up. And they needed loosening up.

Leaving the constraints of BYU, leaving a church that demanded unhealthy sacrifices and imposed immoral beliefs, was, in retrospect, lifesaving for me.

And yesterday, in Brooks' book and in Stirling's and Kiff's cabin, I understood again the pleasures of being inside while outside.

Worse than Hives

I had just finished an article about Heinrich von Kleist's story the "Marquise von O. . ." and needed the critical editions of Schopenhauer, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Herder for the citations. Deadline for publication this coming Monday.


My choices? Drive to the University of Utah on a Friday afternoon and fight rush-hour traffic on the way home or drive across town to BYU.


Despite the fact that I get (psychological) hives when I step onto the campus where I taught for 11 years, largely a result of memories of academic freedom violations that drew a strong censure by the AAUP investigators Sam Rushforth and I and others invited to campus, I chose what seemed the easier option and headed down University Parkway toward BYU.


Big mistake!


Traffic slowed down near the BYU stadium and I slowed down too. Behind me I could see a car accelerating instead of slowing. I did the only thing I could: honked. It didn't help a bit. The other car crashed into me, knocking me into the car in front of me so hard that it hit the car in front of it.


It was a Mercury behind me. Its entire engine compartment was destroyed -- liquids leaking everywhere. My Subaru, built higher than the Mercury, took its damage underneath and throughout the frame.


Doors that won't open. Muffler mashed up against the frame. And when I finally drove away, trouble with the drive train.


Moral of this story: stay away from BYU.

SUCCUSSFUL UNIVERSITIE SPELING

A university education ought to do many things, one of which is to foster a heightened awareness for language.

There are two universities in Utah Valley, and both of them seem to have some problem with words.

Take, for instance, the sign on the south entrance of the newly remodelled Losee Center for Student Succuss (photo taken on Monday, the 5th of April).

Hope the remodeling went better than the re-branding.

And if one might snicker and think that this is just what happens at a new university still thinking its way to success, consider the following.

At BYU, just a few miles to the east of the unsuccussessful sign, the very department whose task is to pay attention to the English language, the English Department, lists multiple faculty members on their home page with this proof that the Latin original of the English has passed into forgetfulness:

"Link to Vitae"

If you mix up nominative singular with genitive or plural you're apt to be made fun of, especially if you're professing English or Student Success.

Socialised Medicine: 1967-2010

As a first-year student at Brigham Young University, 18 years old, fresh from the culture of Farmington, New Mexico and scarcely separated from the conservative political influence of my parents, I turned in a research paper for English 115.

My intriguing title was "The Quality of Medical Services under Socialized Medicine."

I proposed to prove that "compulsory medical care results in a lower standard of individual treatment than is found under the free enterprise system."

I was so convincing in my arguments that my professor awarded me a grade of C+ and wrote that my paper was "adequate."

My major point was obvious to me: "When people must pay their own medical expenses they are not sick as often as if they are not paying their own bill."

Powerful logic, echoed by my Republican Representative Jason Chaffetz tonight: "we're going to sue! The Federal Government can't take away our rights this way!"

Tomorrow I'll put a check in the mail to the Democratic Congressional Association, the DCCC, to thank them (not including the one Utah Democrat, Jim Matheson) for passing a health-care bill that will, for all its warts, make it possible for the 3 of my adult working children who can't afford health insurance under the present system to sign up for insurance.

And then hope for future changes to the system that will bring down costs even more while insuring more and more of us.