To what extent are TBM/Apologist tastes Brethren-directed?

[_karl61]

Do you want me to write down some paragraphs from Sophie's Choice - You want me to quote Nathan in the hallway when Stingo hears Nathan start screaming at Sophie. You want me to quote a chapter in the book when Stingo hears Sophie and Nathan having sex in the room above his little pink apartment.

[Guest]

Do you want me to write down some paragraphs from Sophie's Choice - You want me to quote Nathan in the hallway when Stingo hears Nathan start screaming at Sophie. You want me to quote a chapter in the book when Stingo hears Sophie and Nathan having sex in the room above his little pink apartment.

You can if you want, but you don't need to. I read the novel years ago.

You can, by the way, download a PDF of the current Great Works List for the BYU Honors Program at

http://www.google.com/search?client=fir ... gle+Search

Tell me with a straight face that a person familiar with the works on this list (which, I grant, includes neither Sophie's Choice nor a bottle of Bordeaux) could have no real claim to being reasonably cultured.

[_moksha]

1.

When the Swiss write in "Swiss German," which they do comparatively rarely, they spell phonetically. So, for example, you'll see Schweizerdeutsch, Schwyzerdütsch, Schwiizertüütsch, Schwizertitsch, and etc.

Is this because all their dictionaries were stolen during the war and the Swiss never replaced them since they already had their watches, army knives and banks?

[_JohnStuartMill]

CC, I don't think you realize how silly you look when you dump on Mormons for believing in a preposterous religion. You agree with the Mormons when they say that there's a cosmic primate that created the Earth...

No, I do not. I expressly reject the belief that God has a body of "flesh and bones." As for Jesus Christ, I do not believe he is consubstantial with God, nor do I believe he is a subordinate god.

Okay, so you only think that a cosmic being that looks like a primate created the heavens and the Earth. Now that's a lot more believable!

...and that he can make you live forever if you telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master...

Romans 10:9

9...if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

So the mute cannot be saved? I guess that goes with the childish schadenfreude of the rest of your beliefs.

...and that this primate lived on Earth about two thousand years ago and did magic tricks for a couple of years before he was sacrificed to save you from the hell to which he will send you if you get pleasure from looking at boobies, and then he magically came back to life...

Jesus Christ lived approximately 2000 years ago and I believe that he performed miracles and was resurrected by God. As for hell, I already corrected you in the other thread.

You "corrected" me? Don't you mean that you "threw out a fancy reference, and then pulled a Schryver when JSM challenged it"?

[_maklelan]

Do you want me to write down some paragraphs from Sophie's Choice - You want me to quote Nathan in the hallway when Stingo hears Nathan start screaming at Sophie. You want me to quote a chapter in the book when Stingo hears Sophie and Nathan having sex in the room above his little pink apartment.

How does this at all advance the theory that no respectable BYU professor would recommend this book? Do you view this as some kind of silly threat? "I'll do it, man!" It seems inescapable that your accusation has been thoroughly refuted and you're just lashing out because you're mad.

[_Doctor Scratch]

The second list is indeed a list of ten big books, and it's definitely from Anna Quindlen. The first list, however, is a list of nine books. And it may or may not be from Anna Quindlen.

Be that as it may -- I grant that it's ambiguous -- it does nothing, really, to advance your cause.

Well, it does show that you made a significant blunder in your reading. I hope you own up to the mistake, rather than faulting the "bonehead" Orem librarians and their nasty "ambiguities."

You and Karl would like to suggest that Mormons would find Sophie's Choice too scary to teach at BYU or to recommend. Yet Richard Cracroft, a Mormon academic writing to a Mormon audience, clearly recommends it.

Not quite, since he prefaces the list with a comment about how lists like this tend to be rather arbitrary and silly.

That he does so by citing a list compiled by the probably-Mormon librarians at the Orem Public Library goes no distance at all toward demonstrating that Mormons would find it too "edgy" for what you want to depict as their little provincial minds. Nor does it matter a whit whether the Mormon Dr. Cracroft and the probably-Mormon librarians at the Orem Public Library are endorsing it as part of a list of recommendations by Anna Quindlen. They're still endorsing it in either case.

It kind of matters, since who knows whether or not Cracroft and the Orem librarians have even read it? Their relying on Quindlen to make their recommendations. You don't have sufficient evidence to support your claims. Of course, you're welcome to email the librarians and Dr. Cracroft in order to confirm your random guess.

Yes; of course it's "all right" to read The Canterbury Tales. Who on earth would ever doubt that it is? The Brethren, maybe? Or folks who are accustomed to obeying them?

It was the work of a Google second to locate a citation of the Canterbury Tales in General Conference, by Jeffrey Holland:

http://www.LDS.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?h ... 82620aRCRD

And this recommendation of the Canterbury Tales in the September 1971 Ensign:

http://www.LDS.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?h ... 82620aRCRD

And this citation of the Canterbury Tales in the February 1974 New Era:

http://www.LDS.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?h ... 82620aRCRD

So. Mormons would be scared of Sophie's Choice? Nope. Wrong.

I don't know. Would they? Are you speaking for all Mormons, and for every last passage in Sophie's Choice?

And the Brethren would never countenance the Canterbury Tales? Nope. Wrong again.

That's not what I was saying, nor is that what was implicit in Cracroft's anecdote. The implication of the anecdote was that the bawdiness of the tale might be problematic, or "inappropriate." I'm not saying that the Brethren *would not* give The Canterbury Tales the "thumbs up," but, rather, that the Brethren's rules about art stand a good chance of making TBMs---such as the Cracrofts---feel uncertain about the "appropriateness" of it. And let's face it: The Canterbury Tales is about as mild an example as one could use. Could you imagine Cracroft and his mother reading aloud from and/or laughing at, oh, I don't know---Lady Chatterley's Lover, or Tropic of Cancer?

[_Doctor Scratch]

Do you want me to write down some paragraphs from Sophie's Choice - You want me to quote Nathan in the hallway when Stingo hears Nathan start screaming at Sophie. You want me to quote a chapter in the book when Stingo hears Sophie and Nathan having sex in the room above his little pink apartment.

How does this at all advance the theory that no respectable BYU professor would recommend this book? Do you view this as some kind of silly threat? "I'll do it, man!" It seems inescapable that your accusation has been thoroughly refuted and you're just lashing out because you're mad.

Well, you're going to have a hard time explaining how the prof. would defend the given passages as being appropriate and wholesome for the typical LDS reader.

[_karl61]

from Sophie's Choice:

"I looked up at the ceiling in alarm. The lamp fixture jerked and wobbled like a puppet on a string. Roseate dust sifted down from the plaster, and I half expected the four feet of bed to come plunging through. It was terrifying - no mere copulatory rite but a tournament, a rumpus, a free-forall, a Rose Bowl, a jamboree. The diction was in some form of English, garbled and exotically accented, but I had no need to know the words. what resulted was impressionistic. Male and female, the two voices comprised a cheering section, calling out such exhortations as I had never heard. Nor had I ever listened to such goads to better effort - to slacken off, to push on, to go harder, faster, deeper - nor such huzzahs or gained first downs, such groans of despair over lost yardage, such shrill advice as to where to put the ball. And I could not have heard it more clearly had I been wearing special earphones. Clear it was, and of heroic length. Unending minutes the struggle seemed to last, and I sat there sighing to myself until it was suddenly over and the participants had gone, literally, to the showers. The noise of splashing water and giggles drifted down through the flimsy ceiling, then here were padding, footsteps, more giggles, the sharp smack of what sounded like a playful paw upon a bare bottom and finally, incongruously, the ravishing sweet heart of the slow movement of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony from the phonograph. Distraught, I went o the medicine chest and took an Alka-Selzer."

I won't write down the dialogue between schizophrenic Nathan and Sophie when he starts yelling at her at the beginning of the book. Or the words Stingo can't believe he is hearing on the beach when he lays down and listens to other new friends discuss their analysis.

[_karl61]

Do you want me to write down some paragraphs from Sophie's Choice - You want me to quote Nathan in the hallway when Stingo hears Nathan start screaming at Sophie. You want me to quote a chapter in the book when Stingo hears Sophie and Nathan having sex in the room above his little pink apartment.

How does this at all advance the theory that no respectable BYU professor would recommend this book? Do you view this as some kind of silly threat? "I'll do it, man!" It seems inescapable that your accusation has been thoroughly refuted and you're just lashing out because you're mad.

who is mad? this is Saturday night!

[_EAllusion]

I didn't say that because someone said I was wrong about something. I said that because they acted like I wasn't smart enough to understand their point because I disagreed. That person also happens to have been making up facts about a field in which I have worked for years, namely Semitic epigraphy.

Without arguing the other examples, I know you brought up the dumb hillbilly gambit simply after I argued that denying a person's interpretation of an experience does not mean denying the "qualia" of it.