have you been sorted?

this was kind of fun.

be sorted @ nimbo.net

It is amazing where you'll find yourself in the blogworld. This morning, all in advance of doing my morning pages, I've been to Wil Wheaton's clown sweater blog post, redlipstick, and Malcolm Gladwell's blog, the New York fashion show slideshows looking at french fry dresses. All from links in knitbloggers' posts. And because it was so random, I didn't even note URL's for links. It's like six degrees of separation. . .But I can tell you, I almost always start at zeneedle. It's a psychological thing--I love to see the Utah mountains in her posts. It always feels like home.

One place it didn't feel like home was in last night's premiere of Big Love, HBO's new series about a modern Utah polygamist family. The characters were saying all the right words, "prophet," "Relief Society," "mission," "time and all eternity," but they just didn't sound right. I think it might be the regional accent that's missing: they just don't sound like Utahns. Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloe Sevigny and Ginnifer Goodwin don't have that flat, willing wife drawl.

I watched on A&E a couple of weeks ago a show about polygamist cults (yes, as distinct from the main cult), and some of the men just looked like sex-fiend mountain men, but one of them definitely had the cadence, tone, timbre of official Mormondom down. It has just been since I was an adult that I've recognized that all the Mormon apostles have the same speech patterns and tones, and been smart enough to wonder, hmm, I wonder who their speech coach is. Because they don't come out of their farm team pulpits sounding like that. But as far as the show goes, I'll suspend disbelief because of the views of the mountains and the desert. I liked the comment on the show's bulletin board: "It seems to me that postmodern Hollywood types trying to do a program that accurately portrays Mormonism would be like an illiterate blind man trying to read Proust." Amen. It certainly would've been more interesting, instead of portraying the wives as one-dimensional sex fiends, to explore the much more (likely and) complicated and complex issue of faith and religious power as a duck blind for sex fiendishness.

As strange as polygamy is, it is the true legacy of the origins of the modern Mormon church. I think the true crime is that modern Mormonism sanitizes its history to earn legitimacy. Isn't it convenient that, as soon as it was clear Utah wouldn't become a state while polygamy was sanctioned by the church, um God revealed "oops, I was just kidding"? It was a freakin' administrative decision--why couldn't they just call it that? Well, I suppose because they had to convince those that they'd convinced in the first place by telling them it was a divine revelation, and not just Joseph Smith being an adolescent wanker.