David Markson, of Wittgenstein’s Mistress fame, finished his life and career with a quartet of experimental novels–Reader’s Block (1996), This Is Not a Novel (2001), Vanishing Point (2004), and The Last Novel (2007)–that are each composed entirely of brief, non-sequitur anecdotes about famous authors and artists.
Joseph Smith, Jr. was born just after the winter solstice and killed just after the summer solstice.
Brigham Young sent a group of LDS artists on a mission to Paris, specifically to learn how to paint the murals within the endowment rooms of the Salt Lake Temple.
Online mass-protests had to be organized to save the Pioneer-era art preserved within the Manti Temple during the 2021 renovations.
The murals of the Salt Lake Temple were torn down and destroyed during the 2019 renovations.
As of this writing, the first Google hit for The Book of Mormon is tickets to the Southpark Broadway musical.
The steady accumulation of these various anecdotes in Markson’s final four novels slowly begin to form a narratively-suggestive portrait of the author’s own frustrated state-of-mind.
Jimmy Eat World’s first bassist quit to serve a mission.
Parley P. Pratt’s satirical short-story, “Joe Smith and the Devil,” generally credited as the first work of Mormon fiction, was first published by the New York Herald in 1844–the same year as Smith’s murder.
Joseph Smith wrote a long-poem version of D&C 76, in rhyming quadrants.
If Eliza R. Snow hadn’t written “O My Father,” would we still have a doctrine of Heavenly Mother preserved in popular memory?
Joseph Smith’s third-grade education–cited as evidence by both his enemies and his adherents.
Joseph Fielding Smith edited and compiled Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith–and corrected all the spelling errors.
Walter Rane, passing correlation.
J. Kirk Richards, just as talented, not.
Ruth May Fox was a nationally-prominent suffragist activist, General Relief Society President–and a polygamist wife.
The Relief Society in the 1970s (by then a firmly monogamous organization) was organized to oppose the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.
As David Markson repeatedly describes his multi-novel project.
Dallin H. Oaks was a machine-gunner in Korea.
Russel M. Nelson was part of the research team that pioneered the cardiopulmonary bypass and heart-lung machine in 1951 at the University of Minnesota.
Eugene England was a branch president in Minnesota.
Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker of Low are from Duluth, Minnesota.
Ken Jennings and Brandon Sanderson were roommates at BYU.
The first patient of Nelson’s research team was a 6-year-old girl with a congenital heart defect. The heart-lung machine worked well for the first 40 minutes, but the heart defect was irreparable and the girl died on the operating table.
How the Church Sunday School manual cites William Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Eternity” as evidence of our collective belief in the pre-mortal existence.
How Emerson’s “Harvard Divinity Address” is cited at the start of the video on the life of Joseph Smith at the Carthage Jail visitor’s center.
Thomas S. Monson quoting Cardinal Woosley from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, “Had I but served my God with half the zeal I served my king, he would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies.”
William Carlos Williams insinuated that Joseph Smith consumed hallucinogenic mushrooms in the sacred grove–as mentioned in The Great American Novel, his 1923 novella about the impossibility of writing the great American novel.
Any time Thomas S. Monson quoted a line of poetry but didn’t cite the author, it is reasonable to assume that Monson himself was the author.
Russel M. Nelson was Spencer W. Kimball’s heart surgeon–which he later described as the most perfect surgery of his career.
David Markson’s stated goal with this tetralogy was to see how much of everything he could cut out from what we typically call a novel–plot, setting, character, narrator–and still have something resembling a novel.
The original of the Christus statue–now the Church logo–is in a Lutheran Church in Copenhagen, Denmark.
The Church-approved picture of Christ’s Second Coming was painted by a Seventh-Day Adventist.
The artist of the Washington, D.C. Temple mural, which also depicts Christ’s Second Coming, painted himself into the center of the scene.
Orson F. Whitney claimed “We will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own”–when all of English letters have scarcely produced one of each in 600 years.
Spencer W. Kimball issued his call to produce Michaelangelos and Handels of our own in 1967.
Joseph Paul Vorst, painter of the Great Depression, was a member.
The Christus statue on the current Church logo–long hair, beard, bare shoulders, flowing robes–would not be allowed to attend BYU under current Dress & Grooming standards.
Orson Pratt and Brigham Young openly disagreed on the topic of a Progressing God and “Kingdom Jumping.”
As did Eugene England and Bruce R. McConkie over a century later.
The missing 116 pages.
The sealed portion of the plates.
The four extant accounts of the First Vision.
The Spanish composer Francisco Estévez is a member.
Avant-garde composer John Cage was high school friends with Hugh Nibley.
Orson Scott Card’s bizarre insistence that his series of Sci-Fi novels about an exiled family flying a starship to a promised land isn’t based on 1 Nephi.
“My friend, spiritually speaking, I have tasted salt.” -Elder Boyd K. Packer, The Candle of the Lord, 1982
“I cannot describe salt.” -Poet Elizabeth Willis, Drive, 2003
Ezra Taft Benson was Secretary of Agriculture to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the same President who dispatched Federal Troops to enforce Brown vs. Board of Education in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Orson F. Whitney’s scolding response-poem to William Ernest Henley’s Invictus.
Benson would later lambast the Civil Rights movement as a communist plot in his 1968 book An Enemy Hath Done This.
The first edition of the Book of Mormon repeatedly transposes was for were.
The Pearl of Great Price was initially compiled to make available certain Church publications in Great Britain, and wasn’t canonized till 7 years after Joseph Smith’s death.
The Doctrine and Covenants was so named because it initially contained Lectures on Faith–the “Doctrine” of the title–which was removed in 1921.
The Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible was never completed.
E.B. Grandon added every single punctuation mark to the Book of Mormon; there were none in the manuscript Joseph Smith delivered to him.
The Corrin, Utah “Anti-Manti pageant” was a satirical parody of the Manti and Hill Cumorah pageants, celebrating Corrin’s non-Mormon/anti-Mormon history–which by the 21st century largely featured LDS actors in the cast.
E.B. Grandon never joined the church, nor ever expressed interest in doing so.
Well into the early 20th century, Utah men once imprisoned for polygamy would proudly wear their prison stripes in local Pioneer Day parades.
There are only 6 women named by name in the Book of Mormon–one of whom is the Virgin Mary.
Another of whom is Eve.
Joseph Smith was arrested over 40 times.
Theologically speaking, Russel M. Nelson and Dallin H. Oaks, as re-married widowers, are technically polygamists.
“Could feminism have saved the Nephites?” -Carol Lynn Pearson, 1994
Richard G. Scott, also a widower, never remarried.
Neal A. Maxwell’s endless alliterations–and how in every Conference talk, he updated the count of known stars in the universe.
When Mormon missionaries first arrived in west Africa post-1978, they found informal LDS congregations already organized–and women passing the sacrament.
The Relief Society had commissioned a series of paintings depicting Book of Mormon scenes–but were vetoed and replaced by Arthur Friberg, whose uber-muscular paintings are still placed in proselyting copies of the Book of Mormon today.
The Living Scriptures Animated videos of the 1980s and ’90s, whose imagery is modeled explicitly on the Friberg paintings.
Carol Lynn Pearson started out by self-publishing her first book of poetry.
Markson’s entire tetralogy continues in this manner, one brief anecdote after another–unconventional, yet also strangely hypnotic, even compulsively readable.
George Albert Smith suffered from clinical depression his entire adult life–and once spent 3 years bed ridden.
Brigham Young never founded BYU–but he did the University of Utah.
J. Reuben Clark delivered an anti-immigration graduation speech when he was valedictorian at the University of Utah–to thunderous applause.
David Markson, Jewish himself, spends much of his first book in the series, Reader’s Block, cataloging how many famous authors and artists were anti-Semitic.
The number of German-Jewish converts to the Church in the 1930s was of course minuscule–yet J. Reuben Clark still denied them sponsorship to immigrate to America after Hitler came to power.
Helmuth Hübener was simultaneously executed and excommunicated by his local German branch president for opposing the Nazi regime during WWII.
At the request of the Anti-Defamation League, the Church has had to repeatedly request members cease performing vicarious baptisms for Anne Frank and other Holocaust victims.
The video The Lamb of God was discontinued by the Church missionary department and replaced with the saccharine Finding Faith in Christ, after Mel Gibson’s much more graphic portrayal of crucifixion, The Passion of the Christ, debuted in 2004.
Mel Gibson later turned out to be an anti-Semite.
The vicarious baptisms also performed for Adolph Hitler.
Howard W. Hunter helped to spearhead the BYU Jerusalem center.
If Christ is the “Lamb of God”–and if we are to follow the example of Christ in all things, even inherit all things with Him–does that not argue that we are all also Lambs sent to the slaughter?
Aren’t we all anyways?
“Oh Lord My God” is the beginning of a Masonic stress call–Joseph Smith may have been signaling the other masons in the Carthage mob.
Was Gordon B. Hinckley really the last Church President to date to have served a mission?
Neal A. Maxwell blessed bread in his helmet while in the foxholes of the Pacific theater.
Thomas S. Monson served in the Navy during WWII.
Boyd K. Packer was a fighter pilot.
Hugh Nibley stormed Utah Beach on D-Day.
Charles Dickens did not actually scoff “Revelation in the age of railroads!” re: the Mormons–though it was still published in a journal that he edited.
Major Christmas celebrations in Utah did not begin until the arrival of the British converts en masse in the mid-19th century.
Major Easter celebrations in the Church did not begin till literally this year.
The King Follet discourse is the only Joseph Smith sermon to be regularly anthologized in collections of famous U.S. sermons–but because it was delivered off-the-cuff, there remains no scholarly agreement about any of the original wording.
Bruce R. McConkie reportedly told congregations that if a bomb went off in the building, odds are most everyone there would receive their exaltation.
Mark Hoffman set off a car bomb to cover up his Salamander Letter forgeries in 1985.
Polygamist Mormons infamously feature as the villains in A Study in Scarlet, the very first Sherlock Holmes story.
Mormon polygamists are also disparagingly featured in Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days.
Big Love on HBO came out this century.
The German philosopher Arthur Shopenhauer wrote approvingly of the Mormons–but only because polygamy supported his own misogyny, misanthropy, and pessimism.
Halldor Laxness, Iceland’s sole Nobel laureate, wrote a good-natured novel called Paradise Reclaimed about an Icelandic farmer who converts and emigrates to polygamy-era Springville, Utah.
M. Russell Ballard’s story in his memoir Our Search for Happiness about the time he ignored a prompting to not become a distributor for the Ford Edsel–the most notorious flop in U.S. automotive history.
The Mormon-turned-Catholic-turned-hermit preacher in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing.
The heavy indebtedness of Ezra Taft Benson’s “Beware of Pride” to C.S. Lewis–an Anglican.
The fact that M. Russell Ballard omits from Our Search for Happiness the time he was sanctioned by the SEC for fraud when he was Keystone president.
That long stretch towards the end of the 20th century when you could scarcely go a General Conference without hearing Fiddler on the Roof quoted.
Usually “If I was a rich man.”
The $100 billion hedge fund.
The $5 million SEC fine.
Brigham Young’s warning that the Saints would be tried and tempted with riches.
The United Order.
The Osmonds.
Mormon 8:36-37
Joseph Smith changed the name of Commerce, IL to Nauvoo “The Beautiful”–
LDS Business College was recently renamed Ensign College.
Ensign Peak investments.
A BYU grad still has not yet become Church President–largely because BYU was still only a small, parochial academy when most of the current senior Apostles were college age.
The title to David Markson’s second book in this tetralogy, This Is Not A Novel, is an allusion to René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe–“this is not a pipe”–a painting on the treachery of images, since a picture of a pipe is of course not the same thing as an actual pipe.
And if ye believe not in these words, believe in Christ, reads 2 Nephi 33:10.
I do not blame anyone for not believing my story. If it had not happened to me, I would not have believed it either. Said Joseph Smith.
Worlds without number.
Senator Harry Reid believed in the existence of UFOs.
Jimmy Eat World dedicated “Futures” to the angel Moroni.
Memorizing the discussions pre-Preach My Gospel.
The unintentional(?) comedy of the “Less-Effective/More Effective” sections in the older Missionary Guide.
Bruce R. McConkie was the first Apostle to report back to Spencer W. Kimball that he was unable to find any doctrinal or historical justification for denying Black Priesthood ordination.
Mark E. Petersen was in Brazil on assignment when the 1978 revelation was received.
Conveniently.
Hugh B. Brown of the First Presidency was the sole voice of advocacy for Black ordination throughout the McKay administration, and was “demoted” back to Apostle after McKay’s death. He passed away in 1975.
Joseph Smith ran for President on an abolitionist platform.
Brigham Young legalized slavery in Utah territory.
Gladys Knight is a convert.
Alex Boyé is a convert.
Elijah Abel passed away in 1884.
Ernest P. Wilkinson wanted to build a network of multiple Church colleges across the western U.S. He was thwarted in part by a new Apostle named Boyd K. Packer, who proposed the Institute program instead.
The old urban legends of Steve Martin being a convert.
Christina Aguillera.
The Mormon colonies in Chihuahua, Mexico, were friendly with the dictator Porfirio Diaz–and also with the revolutionary Pancho Villa.
Remembering that Hagoth is who sailed over the horizons in search of new lands but was never heard from again.
Donnie Osmond’s publicist suggested that he get involved in a staged drug-bust in order to recover his “un-hip” image in the 1980s.
Lex de Azevedo won a Golden Globe for The Swan Princess soundtrack.
Saturday’s Warrior vs My Turn on Earth—both now just ‘70s kitsch.
Has anyone else ever noticed the absolutely stacked string of Tabernacle Choir albums released by Craig Jessop and Mack Wilburg in the early 2000s? Has any stretch of Tab records matched it before or since?
Lindsey Sterling performed at Madison Square Gardens after having served her mission in New York City.
Lindsey Sterling has also struggled with eating disorders.
Elizabeth Smart calling out the “chewing gum” lessons on chastity after her abduction, rape, and escape.
The D&C curses pronounced upon New York, Boston, and Albany.
The Temples in New York and Boston.
(Guess Albany is still screwed.)
The Church’s annual “Light the World” Christmas campaigns in Times Square, New York.
The Tabernacle Choir was first formed by Welsh immigrants.
Bruce R. McConkie wrote the words to the hymn “I Believe in Christ”–and even recorded a spoken-word rendition of it with the Tabernacle Choir.
James E. Faust wrote the words to “This Is the Christ,” also recorded and oft-performed by the Tabernacle choir.
Russel M. Nelson once composed a new hymn that was sung by the Tabernacle choir in General Conference–and then was never heard again.
D&C sections 121-123 are epistolary works; they were written as asides in longer letters from Liberty Jail.
John C. Sorenson proposed a limited geography thesis for the Book of Mormon in 1978.
Spanish is currently the second most widely spoken language in the Church.
Always caught off guard to remember Joseph Smith had a brother named Don Carlos.
Eugene England resigned from Dialogue, the journal he himself founded, in order to secure a position at BYU.
Well into the late-19th century, a Fast & Testimony meeting was specifically understood to be a time to bare testimony of Joseph Smith’s prophethood–as delivered by people old enough to have seen him alive.
Eugene England taught at BYU 20+ years–but finished his career at then-UVSC, after being forced to retire in 1998.
William Gaddis briefly rehearses the origins and expansion of the LDS Church in a 1998 essay on the ominous rise of the American religious right.
The word Mormon appears multiple times in James Joyce’s impossibly dense Finnegans Wake.
Still unclear as to how to pronounce BYUCK.
The Wilkinson Student Center is right across the square from the Harold B. Lee library–despite the fact that Wilkinson and Lee openly despised each other while alive.
Every modern U.S. chapel comes equipped with a basketball court–yet to date the only Church member to even briefly make it to the NBA is Jimmer Fredette.
Steve Young won three super bowls with the 49ers. Playing on Sundays.
Stephen Carter, an assistant to Eugene England at UVSC.
Mitt Romney marched with Black Lives Matter supporters in 2020.
Romney’s 47% comment behind closed doors, caught on camera, sinking his 2012 campaign.
Mitt Romney’s father George was born in Mexico–and also opposed Vietnam and supported the Civil Rights movement. Pre-1978.
The Church entire was technically crossing the border into Mexico when they emigrated to Utah in 1847–until the border crossed them in 1848.
The Mormon Battalion–a faith-inspiring story north of the border, an embarrassing episode south of it.
Joseph Smith marked the Song of Solomon as not inspired scripture.
Janice Kapp Perry wrote over 3,000 songs.
Nibley delivered the notorious “We come before thee dressed in the black robes of a false priesthood” prayer at BYU commencement just after he had reluctantly turned down a faculty position at Berkeley.
Fawn Brodie was David O. McKay’s niece.
Spencer W. Kimball had a non-practicing son.
David O. McKay was friends with Cecil B. DeMille, director of The Ten Commandments.
Jack Harrell is a convert.
Wilkinson also tried to move Ricks College to Idaho Falls–but was prevented by President McKay himself, after personally promising the people of Rexburg to keep the college there.
There is a massive painting of Napoleon Bonaparte hanging in the General Conference center.
David Markson’s third book in the series, Vanishing Point, is a double reference to the art of painting perspective, and to the inevitable moment when a work of art is lost and forgotten entirely.
McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine, one of the most popular non-fiction books in the history of the faith, has been out of print since at least 2008.
Spencer W. Kimball’s The Miracle of Forgiveness–same trajectory, same fate.
The Book of Mormon narrates two ancient American civilizations that were completely wiped off the face of the earth and disappeared from all historical memory.
Nauvoo at its brief height rivaled Chicago as largest city in Illinois; at its most recent census numbered less than 1,000 residents.
Lake Bonneville was a super-massive paleolake that dwarfed the Great Lakes in size and filled the entirety of what is now called the Salt Lake Basin–of which the current Great Salt Lake is only a small and rapidly vanishing remnant.
Insurance policies taken out against famous paintings refuse to cover inherent vice.
Cleave unto charity, which is the greatest of all, for all things must fail–
Hugh Nibley first proposed that the Native American tribes of North America were likely long-range Jaredite descendants–whom he in turn argued were of primarily Asian steppe, not Semitic, extraction, based on their modes of total warfare–in 1952. One year before the discovery of DNA.
Two LDS lawyers helped author the infamous “Torture Memos” for the George W. Bush administration that led directly to Abu Ghraib.
George Romney ran against Nixon for the Republican nomination in 1968.
Mitt Romney was the only Republican Senator to vote in favor of Trump’s first impeachment.
The Mormon Tabernacle Choir performed at Trump’s inauguration.
Except for one choir member, who chose to sit it out.
Glen A. Larson, the creator of the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica, was a member of the Church.
Brandon Flowers recorded “I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier” during a purported period of inactivity in the Church.
We teach that the United States was established by the hand of God to guarantee religious freedom so that the Church could be founded–yet the U.S. alone is where the Church was nearly exterminated (not even in Nazi Germany).
Heber J. Grant argued vociferously against the repeal of Prohibition–yet Utah was the final state to approve it.
The chief architect for Church Temples is a convert from Portland, Oregon–and the Portland Temple is the only Temple outside of Salt Lake and Nauvoo to feature external symbolism.
The roof of the Manti Temple–located in the middle of the deserts of central Utah–is based off the underside of a ship.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home–“He did a little too much LDS back in the ’60s.”
David O. McKay, a staunch Republican, was close friends with Lyndon B. Johnson–even calling each other shortly after the JFK assassination.
Joseph Smith was the first U.S. Presidential candidate assassinated in an election year.
Mark E. Petersens’ spies in the Church History department under Leonard Arrington.
Ernest P. Wilkinson’s spies on BYU campus.
The sheer number of auto accidents caused by the Washington, D.C. Temple.
A stray comment from The Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt: getting served coffee in a Missouri jail. Like it was no big deal.
Caffeinated beverages were banned from BYU campus till 2012.
Actually, that’s not quite true: the J. Reuben Clark Law School has had a Coke Machine since 1972. The school’s first dean, Rex E. Lee, had requested one from BYU Dining services; when denied, he approached Coca-Cola corporation directly.
“I hope one day that CES will join the Church,” quipped Gordon B. Hinkley.
“I’d just as soon commit adultery as drink a Coke,” someone supposedly told J. Golden Kimball. “Who the hell wouldn’t?” Kimball supposedly said back.
Leonard Arrington’s instructions for his diaries to not be published till 25 years after his death.
RLDS president Joseph Smith III wrote poetry–often about the melancholic absence of his father.
Ronald E. Poelman’s 1984 Conference talk was censored after the fact–as was Boyd K. Packer’s 2010 Conference talk.
Mark Z. Danielewski’s father was Professor of Film and Theater at BYU in the ’70s and ’80s; Nauvoo is cited by name twice in his 2006 novel Only Revolutions.
The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints changed its name to the Community of Christ in 2003.
The Community of Christ is who retains current possession of the Kirtland Temple.
We also often teach that the Protestant Reformation was a necessary precursor to the Restoration–yet it has been in the Catholic-majority countries wherein the Church has faced the least persecution.
Joseph Smith instructed the Saints in Nauvoo to respect the Catholic Church, since they preserved the tradition of Christianity throughout the centuries.
Bruce R. McConkie identified Catholicism as the Church of the Devil in Mormon Doctrine.
Del Parson art has appeared on Catholic calendars sold in U.S. parishes.
Was Thomas S. Monson the last Apostle to be called in his 30s?
Joseph Smith was killed in his 30s.
Who was the last working-class Apostle?
Nibley was openly contemptuous of the Church casting Jimmy Stewart in the schmaltzy Mr. Kruger’s Christmas.
Jane Frances Kaczmarek–best known as the Mom in Malcolm in the Middle–was cast in an ’80s Church film production of O. Henry’s The Last Leaf.
Cipher in the Snow, The Pump, The Letter, The Touch of the Master’s Hand–what was going on with the Church media department in the 1980s to produce such a string of incredibly depressing short-films??
Jon Heder attended BYU-Provo–yet his best-known film takes place near BYU-Idaho. He also served his mission in Japan, yet his second most famous film is set in rural Mexico.
Aaron Eckhart, the actor of Harvey Two-Face in The Dark Knight, is a member.
Ryan Gosling–raised Mormon, no longer practicing.
Also Katherine Heigl, Amy Adams, Paul Walker, etc.
Win Butler of Arcade Fire, Bret McCracken of The Used, etc.
Joshua James performing in a sleeveless tanktop without an undertop.
Val Kilmer was at one point attached to Richard Dutcher’s Joseph Smith biopic–that is, until Dutcher left the Church himself.
Leo Tolstoy believed the Mormon religion was “two-thirds deception,” but said he preferred a religion “which professed to have dug its sacred books out of the earth to one that pretended that they were let down from heaven.”
Jack Harrel’s “The Prophet Claude” is based on an anecdote of Gordon B. Hinkley sneaking away to a hardware store during a lunch break, where he could be unrecognized for an hour.
Brian Evenson, professor of Creative Writing, forced to resign from BYU, after being complained about by an anonymous grad student.
Levi Peterson’s “The Third Nephite” caused a scandal when it first appeared in the pages of Dialogue–and later became a part of English course syllabi at BYU-Idaho.
George Bernard Shaw once had dinner with John A. Widstoe when he was president of the British mission. When the latter bragged of how many thousands of converts they’d had in England, Shaw replied, “I am not interested in that. What I want to know is how many of your converts do you keep.”
Avraham Gileadi published a study on Isaiah that was lavishly praised by no less than Truman G. Madsen, Hugh Nibley, and Ellis T. Rasmussen–yet he was still excommunicated as one of the September Six.
Later re-baptized and reinstated.
As was Helmuth Hübener.
Lavina Fielding Anderson continued attending Church after her 1993 excommunication. In 2019, her local stake leaders recommended her rebaptism to the First Presidency; her bid was rejected without reason, nor conditions for reinstatement.
David Markson’s The Last Novel was not actually intended to be his last novel; he was reportedly at work on a fifth in the series, when he himself passed away in 2010.
The Isaiah references in Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible.
Neon Trees.
James E. Talmage purportedly wrote Jesus the Christ in the upper rooms of the Salt Lake Temple.
Nephi Anderson wrote Added Upon–which concludes with a description of the City of Zion during the Millennium living in perfect equality–while living in 1890s Brigham City, where the United Order was still practiced.
Early in The Last Novel, the Novelist declares that this will be his final novel, so he will write whatever he damn well pleases.
How David A. Bednar’s very first Conference Talk added the phrase “the tender mercies of the Lord” to LDS discourse.
Harold Bloom unqualifiedly praised the Mormonism of Joseph Smith in a 2007 PBS documentary–and lambasted Mitt Romney and Thomas S. Monson in a 2011 New York Times op-ed.
“I go as a lamb to the slaughter–” As do we all, frankly.
Ted Bundy attended the University of Utah Law School.
Never having been able to locate a source for the Brigham Young “menace to society” line.
Henry B. Eyering did not get married till he was 29.
Hugh Nibley not till he was 36.
Steve Young not till he was 39.
John Welch and Chiasmus.
Jack Weyland and Charlie.
All the most famous authors in the Church–Orson Scott Card, Stephanie Meyer, Brandon Sanderson–are genre fiction writers.
Harold Bloom compared the Book of Mormon’s prose to JRR Tolkien–but not as a compliment.
David Markson had nothing but contempt for Harold Bloom, incidentally, and mocks him repeatedly in his final tetralogy.
Gerald R. Lund’s expansive The Work and the Glory ennealogy–even adapted into a film trilogy during the LDS cinema renaissance of the 2000s–does anyone even remember it anymore, let alone read it?
Does anyone remember EFY CDs anymore? Do they deserve to be remembered?
Peter Breinholdt’s “You Wear Flowers”–such a popular local hit in the 1990s that BYU marching band performed it at halftime.
The Singles Ward soundtrack–with its tongue-in-cheek Punk and Indie covers of LDS hymns–omnipresent among missionaries in the early-2000s, forgotten since.
Mark Twain famously called the Book of Mormon “chloroform in print”–but also quoted long passages from it in his travel-memoir Roughing It.
Mark Twain also gleefully describing a wildfire near Lake Tahoe he inadvertently caused in Roughing It.
The lonely figure of Brigham Young making sure every campfire in Provo Canyon was put out after a Pioneer Day celebration.
The Provo Tabernacle, gutted by fire, rebuilt as a Temple.
The California wildfire smoke that gave Utah the worst air quality in the world Summer of 2021.
The Spirit of God like a fire is burning.
All the elements shall melt with a fervent heat–
The burned and blackened copy of the Book of Mormon, missing a title page, stumbled upon by Vincenzo Di Francesca in 1910 New York City.
Adapted to a 1987 Church film, “How Rare a Possession”.
George Albert Smith began the Church’s affiliation with the Boy Scouts of America.
Thomas S. Monson was a Silver Beaver in the Boy Scouts of America.
The LDS Church formally cut ties with the Boy Scouts of America in 2018, shortly after Monson’s passing.
The open speculation that Henry Eyering–upon whose work multiple other chemists have won the Nobel Prize–never won the Nobel himself due to his faith.
Church historians’ heavy reliance on Lucy Mack Smith’s memoir.
No man knows my history.
No ma’am that’s not history.
Despite the amorphous, un-orientable nature of Markson’s tetralogy, they each still form narratives of sort, almost in spite of themselves, as the unnamed narrators–alternately referred to as Reader, Writer, Author, and Novelist–move towards a moment of apparent suicide and/or death.
Guitarist Mick Ronson, David Bowie’s closest collaborator throughout his ’70s glam-rock period, was raised LDS; his 1993 funeral was held at a London LDS chapel.
Arthur “Killer” Kane, bassist for the influential ’70s band The New York Dolls, was a convert. A documentary on his life was filmed by his Home Teacher in Los Angeles.
Kane passed away shortly after a 2004 New York Dolls reunion show that was put together by Morrissey of The Smiths.
The title of David Clark’s Death of a Disco Dancer is an allusion to a Smiths song.
Smith is the most common surname in the English language.
Joseph and Hyrum Smith were co-presidents of the Church at the time of their deaths.
One of Lorenzo Snow’s son-in-laws performed a drag show for him at his 90th birthday party.
David Archuleta coming out.
Tyler Glenn.
Carol Lynn Pearson’s husband.
Hugh Nibley’s youngest daughter Zina coming out and moving to Florida with her partner after her retirement from BYU.
How Church DJs at stake youth dances still play the Village Peoples’ “YMCA” to this day without the slightest shred of self-awareness.
Dallin H. Oaks was raised by a single mother.
The French “Brethren, adieu” at the end of Jacob 7–which (like the Spanish “Adios”) means literally, “I commit you to God.”
The footnote to 2 Nephi 12:16–‘The Greek (Septuagint) has “ships of the sea.” The Hebrew has “ships of Tarshish.” The Book of Mormon has both, showing that the brass plates had lost neither phrase.’
Learning how to pronounce “Sesquicentennial” in 1997.
Brigham Young canceled a General Conference in order to organize the rescue of the Willie Handcart Company.
The “I Was a Stranger” program was announced at October Conference 2016, to assist with the Syrian refugees, but lasted less than a year.
The last Hill Cumorah pageant was performed in 2019.
April Conference 2020–the bicentennial of the First Vision–disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The exclusion of “Amazing Grace” from the Hymn book–despite it being recorded multiple times by the Tabernacle Choir.
How many copies of the Book of Mormon have ended up in the garbage?
David Markson’s The Last Novel ends by quoting the Dutch painter Jan van Eyck: “Als ich can“–all I can do.
It is by grace we are saved, after all we can do.
After all we can do.
Which sometimes isn’t very much.
There are over 240 “Restorationist” sects of Mormonism scattered across the Independence/Kansas City area–most ranging in size from a few hundred to a few thousand–all unaffiliated with the Utah church.
The cornerstone of the Independence Temple, the one that was laid by Joseph Smith himself in 1831, is currently owned by the 5,000-strong “Hendrickites”, AKA Church of Christ.
Horses.
Roughly half of Samoa is on the records of the Church.
Our unique folk-tale tradition of the Three Nephites.
The endlessly circulated folk-tales of J. Golden Kimball, the swearing apostle.
Paul H. Dunn’s falsified stories about playing major league baseball and serving in WWII–excused as folk-tales? Or as parables? Or simply lies?
Gene R. Cook’s oft-cited story of sitting next to Mick Jagger on a plane–was Jagger really flying coach? Was Cook really flying first-class? Wouldn’t a Rolling Stone have a private jet?
Rough Stone Rolling by Richard Bushman.
There is still a congregation of Rigdonites in Pennsylvania today.
The Nauvoo Temple, completely rebuilt and rededicated in 2002.
Mormons are who first settled Las Vegas.
San Bernadino.
What verse of “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief” was John Taylor on when the mob stormed Carthage jail?
There has not been a new section added to the Doctrine and Covenants since 1918.
Nor a new declaration since 1978.
Jefferey R. Holland: “It has to be a really good meeting to be better than no meeting at all.”
Samuel Beckett: “Every word is an unnecessary stain on the silence.”
The groanings beyond utterance
The peace of God which surpasseth understanding
Yea, thus saith the still small voice, which whispereth through and pierceth all things, and often times it maketh my bones to quake while it maketh manifest, saying–
The BYU Nauvoo center was a former Catholic nunnery–and is now an empty grass field overlooking the Mississippi.
Joseph F. Smith killed by the Spanish Flu.
Thomas S. Monson’s dementia at the end of his life.
Gordon B. Hinkley is who read Benson’s “Beware of Pride” address over the pulpit in 1989–too bed-ridden to deliver it himself.
Spencer W. Kimball’s oft-cited Bicentennial address in 1976.
Bruce R. McConkie’s oft-cited final testimony in 1985.
The King Follet Discourse was a funeral sermon.
Delivered three months before Smith’s own funeral.
The curious, rarely-noted fact that unlike, say, Catholicism or Buddhism, absolutely no burial sites of Church Prophets or Apostles have become religious pilgrimage sites–not even Joseph Smith’s.
At the entrance to the Idaho Falls Temple: “But the LORD is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him.”
David Markson’s ultimate conclusion in his tetralogy appears to be that you really can cut out everything—
Indeed, everything will be cut out anyways, “for all things must fail–“
In none of his First Vision accounts does Joseph Smith ever specify who exactly the first personage was that said, “This is my Beloved Son, Hear Him–“
Moroni’s promise of Moroni 10:3-5, as memorized and recited by legions of young missionaries, does not ever actually say to pray over whether the Book of Mormon itself is true, but only whether the mercy of God is true.
All is as only one day to God, and time is measured only unto man.
Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.
Our lives passed away like as it were unto us a dream
And though the heavens and the earth pass away–
And the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up–
And I have not friends nor whither to go
Joseph Smith, Jr. was killed on June 27th, 1844.
Brethren, adieu.
I go as a lamb to the slaughter.
After all we can do.
Als ich can.