Excerpt From Intro to Modern Death
[The following is excerpted from the Introduction to Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). If you are a college librarian, please order it here or here; if you quite reasonably wish to save your money, you can download the entire book as a free pdf here or here. Besides of […]
Music for a Sunday Morning, Part 4: Blondie’s “Sunday Girl” and No Doubt’s “Sunday Morning”
You don’t have to have a relationship on the rocks to wake up with that Sunday morning mood, but it definitely doesn’t hurt. More often than not, a relationship–or lack thereof–is why you woke up that way Sunday morning in the first place. Indeed, a relationship-on-the-rocks has oft been the subject of many a Sunday […]
Music for a Sunday Morning, Part 3: Johnny Cash’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and U2 & Johnny Cash’s “The Wanderer”
It almost feels like cheating to put Johnny Cash’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” on a playlist about feeling down on a Sunday morning–it’s just too on the nose. I am Extremely Not A Country Fan (no, not even of sacred cows like Cash), so I’m always about to skip this track whenever it comes up […]
Music for a Sunday Morning, Part 2: Ben Folds’ “Jesusland” and America’s “Sister Golden Hair”
For our second entry in songs for those morose Sunday mornings when the Tab choir just won’t cut it, we start with Ben Folds’ “Jesusland,” off his 2005 album Songs for Silverman. The relevant facts here are that 1) Ben Folds is non-religious (and not Jewish, contrary to popular belief), and 2) he was born […]
Music for a Sunday Morning, Part 1: The Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning” and Jimmy Eat World’s “A Sunday”
My Dad used to muse that Sundays in college, back when he was at BYU, were always the worst, because that purported “day of rest” left him with way too much time to think: “Will I ever get married? Will I ever have kids? Did I pick the right college? Did I pick the right […]
Review: Low, HEY WHAT
Discussing Low and Mormonism has kind of been my thing for a few years now, ever since I wrote an essay on the topic for the Eugene England Foundation, published it with Sunstone, and even posted a Director’s Cut of the same on this very site. As I argued previously, “it is Low’s minimalism, their […]
Futurama, “Godfellas”, and the Gospel
My identity has been uneasily intertwined with the cult TV show “Futurama” ever since my last name became the moniker of the program’s womanizing, alcoholic, kleptomaniac robot. Needless to say, the popular connotations that have ever since been associated with “Bender” are not exactly flattering (and they weren’t exactly great to begin with). Fortunately for […]
On Mistaking ‘90s Alt-Rockers For Ex-Mormons In the Time of COVID
Like many of the Saints in quarantine, one of my coping mechanisms in the early days of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns was to make a playlist. It started off playful enough, what with some rather on-the-nose gallows humor like REM’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”, […]
Meeting Manny Fox
I of course knew nothing about Manny Fox the one and only time I met him; only years later would the obituaries inform me that he was some sort of Broadway legend, a prolific producer and director who had worked with the likes of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, George Burns, Orson Welles, Barbara Streisand, Johnny […]
From The Familiar to House of Leaves: Mark Z. Danielewski Out of Provo, Utah [Updated]
[Presented before the Association of Mormon Letters at the UC-Berkeley LDS Institute of Religion, 29 March 2019] “Mark Z. Danielewski was born in New York City and lives in Los Angeles.” So reads the deceptively austere book-flap bio for the author of the 2000 best-seller House of Leaves, the 2006 National Book Award finalist Only Revolutions, and most recently The Familiar Vol. 1-5, published serially from 2015-2017. Yet as befits […]