On The Great Gatsby and Turning 30

"...I just remembered that today's my birthday."
-Nick Harroway, The Great Gatsby 

About a month ago I finally finished The Great Gatsby for the first time since High School, wherein I realized was that this isn't a book for High Schoolers at all.

Much like how "We Are Young" by Fun isn't actually about being young, but about how "Tonight we are young"--that is, we haven't been young in awhile and may never be again--The Great Gatsby is not about the recklessness of youth, but of the recklessness at the end of youth.

Gatsby is less about first pursuing the dream, then when the dream (like yourself) inevitably begins to fray.  For example, the novel's not about Daisy breaking Jay's heart (that's old news when the story opens), but about her breaking her own, abandoning her youthful dreams of romantic love to settle for security and "respectability" with that philandering fool of a millionaire Tom Buchanan.  Such has been her disillusionment that she says cynically of her daughter, "I hope she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."

Likewise for Jay Gatsby, the moment he has Daisy back in his grasp is the same moment when the green light across the harbor--that symbol of all his youthful desires--suddenly loses its luster; "His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one," with the dread promise of more to follow.  

That is, The Great Gatsby is a book for 30-somethings, not adolescents--it's a novel about the end of the dream, not the beginning.  The members of Fun had turned 30 when they sang "We Are Young," as had Nick Harroway at the novel's climax:

"I was thirty.  Before me stretched the portentous menacing round of a new decade...Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair."

That's about as brutal set of sentences as any 30-year-old can read.  It's almost a little too on-the-nose for Nick's youth to end the same night as Gatsby's youthful dream of regaining Daisy. As though turning 30 isn't hard enough as it is.

For even the middle-aged and elderly, folks who normally just smile indulgently when a 20-something complains of their age, have all told me, without exception, in all soberness, that turning 30 was hard.  Maybe the hardest.  You are perhaps reconciled to the inevitable march of time by 40, 50, 60, etc., but 30 is the Big Epistemological Break, the Dividing Line.  Turning 30 is like a car leaking transmission fluid trying to make a gear shift in cold weather--lurching, jolting, heart-attack inducing, and slow to settle into the next stage.

But wait, there's hope!  For with Nick the night of his 30th birthday is Jordan, the tomboyish pro-golfer (and careless driver) he's been crushing on all along the margins of the main plot:

"But there was Jordan beside me who, like Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.  As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat's shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand."

Nick hopes her carelessness will help him to care less as he embarks on this new decade.  But of course, as every High School reader in America knows, his assurance barely lasts; before the last chimes of his 20s have echoed away,  the carelessness of Jordan has, along with Tom's and Daisy's, Myrtle's manslaughter and Gatsby's murder, come to represent for Nick everything wrong with this world.  So Nick, who had tricked us all into thinking he was but the narrator, only a passive mediator and recorder of events, surprises us by turning out to be the true protagonist all along: For his is the only character that grows, who at last acts and is not just acted upon.

He breaks up with Jordan.

This impulsive girl is caught off guard by someone else's impulsiveness.  She doesn't know how to be treated the way she treats others.  She lashes out:

"You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver?  Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I?  I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess.  I thought you were a rather honest, straightforward person.  I thought it was your secret pride."

But Nick is unbowed.  "I'm thirty," he says, "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor."

For you can spend up through the first half of your 20s telling yourself that yours are but youthful indiscretions, indulgences and not character flaws, that you still have your entire life to define who you are, and not face up to the fact that you are becoming that person right now.  But by 30, you know that you fool no one but yourself--and you can no longer let others fool themselves, either--or at least you can't and still count yourself honorable.

And so Nick faces the portentous third decade alone, a little more wary, a little less indulgent; as did America itself as we moved on from our own Roaring 20s into the Depressed 30s, and, like Tom and Daisy, refusing to learn a thing from either.  Or, as Fitzgerald most eloquently puts it:

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Keep Mormonism Weird

Across the street from Voodoo Donuts in downtown Portland is a glorious wall painting that reads:

"KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD."

I've heard it claimed that Austin, Texas actually originated the "KEEP [BLANK] WEIRD" meme, but no matter, Portland has certainly made it its own--and would that all the Lord's cities gloried in their weirdness!  Indeed, when a friend of mine moved from Portland to Salt Lake, her chief gripe about the place was that in Utah, people said "Weird" like it was a bad thing!  Such is not the ethos of Portland.

Nor, frankly, should it be of Utah; and the differing attitudes of Portland and, say, Provo towards "weirdness" speaks volumes of how far the latter has shied away from what we should be most proud of.

Cause everywhere I turn these days, I see the Faith of my Fathers trying to normalize itself every which way, what with all those "And I'm a Mormon" ads and clean-shaven crew-cuts at the BYU and and whole websites dedicated to "normalizing" Mormons in the broader culture.  And while I certainly applaud any and all attempts to make the Church more accessible and approachable, I fear we lose something special when we try to hide our weirdness under a bushel.

For as much as I found The Book of Mormon musical soundtrack to be (like everything South Park) facile, juvenile, offensive, and reductive, I nonetheless must give Trey and Matt thanks, for reminding us that, despite all our marketing campaigns to the contrary, we are a weird people--and quite frankly we should embrace that!

Did not Peter declare that the Saints are to be "a peculiar people?"  Does that not signify that we should mayhaps be, well, peculiar, nay, weird?  And don't tell me about how our abstinence from coffee, drugs, booze and extramarital sex is what makes us "peculiar," plenty of churches have similar milquetoast proscriptions.   No, let's remind all our wannabe-Mitt-Romneys about how both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young established communist societies  of no-rich-no-poor in the Midwest and Rocky Mountains respectively--and that, moreover, these were not mere experiments, but the actual economic order we believe Jesus Christ will personally administer (indeed, that no other system is acceptable before Him) during the Millennium!  How very Portland.

In fact, let's talk about the near-heretical physicality of our religion--almost more Native American than Western--what with a Holy Spirit that is not mystically immaterial but is rather a more refined material that speaks straight to our senses; of the special undergarments we wear beneath our clothing, and the elaborate ceremonies of our Temples that we construct at great expense for very little other reason than to redeem the dead; of the olive oil we place on each others' heads for blessings of health and comfort; of our insistence on a God who inhabits a corporeal body, who exists in space and time; how the Garden of Eden has a GPS co-ordinance in Missouri, how we all existed before we were born, and that God's plan for us is not only for us to return to him but to become like him!

These are all, by the way, high heresies as far as most of "traditional mainstream Christianity" is concerned--and thank heaven for it! I hope we are never traditional and mainstream, I pray we remain forever the Portland of Christianity.

Not only should we just own our weirdness (it's not like others will ever stop reminding us), but our weirdness is very often our actual appeal!  Novelist Jane Barnes explained as much in her pseudo-memoir "Falling In Love With Joseph Smith."

I read the book last summer after a review of it said: "This is the strangest book about Joseph Smith you will ever read."  Barnes is she who helped produce the PBS documentary on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a few years back, and had even met with the missionaries herself--in fact, she almost converted!  Didn't obviously, for reasons she explains more in the book; but what struck me about her fascinating story is that what most attracted her to Mormonism, what caused her to seriously consider baptism at one point, was precisely the weird things that we don't even like to talk about anymore!

For Barnes, it was Joseph Smith translating the Book of Mormon from a stone in a hat--so often mocked by South Park et al--that had the sure touch of divinity for her.  It was the wildness of Joseph Smith, his playfulness, his chutzpah, his audacity and even his cheekiness, the very qualities that caused some early converts to apostatize and be offended at this behavior "unbecoming the dignity of a Prophet of God," those moments in his biography that continue to drive members from the Church to this day--these are the things that she found most inspired! 

It wasn't the calm, meek, dignified Joseph Smith of our official media, but the passionate, reckless, revolutionary Joseph Smith of the biographies that most resembled an authentic Prophet of God to her--like some wild-eyed Elijah, or John the Baptist, or Enoch, "a wild man hath come among us!"  That is, it was the weirdness of Joseph Smith that most attracted her--and I deeply suspect she is not alone. 

For just why do we shy away from how wonderfully human Brother Joseph was?  Is it not comforting to know that God deals with actual human beings, in all of our flaws and short-comings and passions, and not saints?  I don't know about you, but I take great comfort in the thought that if God can do something with rambunctious Joseph Smith, then maybe He can do something with me!

On a similar note, an astrophysicist friend of mine told me that for him, it's all the totally weird stuff in LDS history and cosmology that is the strongest argument for its authenticity: for between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, it turns out that the Universe itself is an incredibly weird place.  Serious, with each new discovery, we find that the wildest speculative sci-fi still has not even touched the total weirdness of the Universe.  It's a very exciting time to be a astrophysicist, he assures me!

Hence, if LDS Church history, theology, and doctrine is going to feel authentic and true, then it's going to have to be as weird as the Universe!   And the Lord be praised, it is!  Despite the best efforts our own members, the Gospel of Jesus Christ continues to be the weirdest thing in the world.  And why shouldn't it?  It should be absolutely other-worldly, for the next world is what it is preparing us for, which will be a life far more alien and strange and wondrous and weird than anything we can conceptualize here.

In fact, the Celestial Kingdom of God is described by Joseph Smith as "a sea of glass and fire," which, to me, sounds like someone trying to describe something he doesn't have the words for; like a time-traveling George Washington trying to explain 21st-century America, with all our freeways and internet and airplanes and space programs, to the First Continental Congress, what words could he possibly use that wouldn't strange from his own mouth?  The next life will feature no fat Rococo toddlers strumming harps in clouds, no, it will be beyond imagination.  Does that description sound weird to you?  Good.

I currently live in Iowa, and I can assure that nothing is more dreadfully dull than "normal" places.  Give me the "weird" lands every day of the week!  Don't say "weird" like it's a bad thing, no: embrace the weirdness!  For to say something is weird is in fact to say it's awesome!  Portland taught me this.

In sum:

Keep Mormonism Weird!

Straining at Gnats is WHY One Swallows Camels

That BYU has an honor code is of course nothing exceptional; most colleges have some sort of honor code that forbids cheating, plagiarism, sexual assault, etc, as well they should.  BYU, along with many religious colleges, expands that list to proscribe alcohol, drug abuse, and extra-marital sex, all of which are core tenets of the faith.  What makes BYU's such a strange beast, then, is its Dress and Grooming standards, one that bans beards of all things from the university named after the beautifully-bearded Brigham Young, as well as bare shoulders on women (such that BYU favorite Ann Romney could not have worn her prom dress there).

At BYU-Idaho where I got my undergrad, the Dress and Grooming Standards were expanded to also forbid shorts, sandals, and capris (not a big deal during the 9-month winters, but kind of silly during the hot-oven summers).  Now, I complied with the Honor Code, because I did in fact sign my name to a document saying I would while I was there; and whatever else may be my thoughts on Dress and Grooming Standards, I do believe in the dire importance of integrity and keeping one's word.  And so I wore jeans to campus in 100-degree heat.

Nevertheless, my compliance did not end my questioning of Dress and Grooming; on the contrary, I was more curious than ever as to its rationale.  I even asked the Dean of Students himself--whom I must hasten to add was a very kind and gracious man who treated my question respectfully--who still could not give anything more specific than the same vague old "if you're obedient in the small things, then that will carry over to obedience in the big things."  The college president, I remember, really loved to hammer that theme home at devotionals.  The thinking, apparently, is if one strains at gnats, then one will definitely strain at camels.

But of course that's not how it works at all!  I'm paraphrasing Christ there of course, who reserved his most furious denunciations for those Pharisees who, though scrupulously obedient to their dress codes, still defrauded the widows and the poor.  "Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel!" He cried.  I know the type well.

For back when I installed security systems, I worked with these BYU salesmen who were likewise scrupulously obedient to Dress and Grooming Standards--even during Summer break!  Even after Graduation!  Such faithfullness!--yet who also still employed all manner of dishonesty to sell systems to the elderly, the legally blind, the deaf, the senile, the impoverished--that is, they defrauded the widows and the poor.  (Somehow that never came up in devotionals). 

I remember being asked to get a haircut by a sales rep who had just told an old woman that the motion sensor could read through walls; and I remember a non-Mormon tech who ordered a beer at a company dinner, and was asked in horror "you're not going to drink that are you?" by the same sales-rep who tried to sell to a legally-blind old woman in the early stages of dementia.  Is it any wonder that I don't care if people drink around me anymore, while I leave the room when a sales-recruiter enters?

But how could all this happen?  Why did their obedience in the small things not carry over to obedience in the larger?  How is it that after profiting off their ill-gotten sales, that they did "pay tithe...and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith," of honesty, integrity, and, well, honor?  In other words, why did the BYU Honor Code fail in its supposed purpose?

Because, as always, the Savior is wiser than us, for He already knew full well 2,000 years ago that straining at gnats doesn't make one strain all the harder at camels, no: Straining at gnats is WHY one swallows camels.

The Problematics of Iman in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Midway through that end-of-the-Cold-War allegory, 1991's Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy are sent to a gulag after being framed for the assassination of the Klingon High Chancellor.  While the crew of the Enterprise is busy planning their jailbreak, solving the who-dunnit, and preventing full-on war, Kirk and McCoy are befriended by a fellow inmate named Martia, who informs them there is already a hit out on them.  She offers them her expertise to help all three of them escape.  Martia later turns out to be an alien shape-shifter, who can transform into whatever shape she needs to survive, dependent on the situation.

This shape-shifting aspect of Martia becomes all the more problematic once one becomes aware that the actress playing her is Somali supermodel Iman, a person who in real life is already quite skilled at shape-shifting to navigate the fraught racial dynamics of contemporary America.

As a fashion-conscious friend recently explained to me, Iman is the daughter of a Somali diplomat who traveled the Middle-East; she was discovered at Nairobi University in Kenya by fashion photographer Peter Beard.  At the time of her first visit to New York in the '70s, she was fluent in 5 languages and was already highly educated and deeply cosmopolitan.  However, when she arrived in New York, she learned that Peter had presented her as this "goat-herder's daughter," as an illiterate, rustic rube of some sort, such that when the Press learned she could speak English fluently, all were caught off guard.

That moment appears to be pretty representative of her entire career, for she was being forced right from her debut to conform, change, shape-shift to the expectations others had for her--and it hasn't always a smooth ride.  Though she achieved instant stardom, she was constantly "too ethnic" for some white audiences, while "not black enough" for some African-American ones.  She was under constant pressure to appear both more and less "authentically African," and was often taken to task for failing the impossible expectation to be both.

As if to underscore her constant navigation between multiple worlds, in 1992 she married British rocker David Bowie, who himself has a reputation as a shape-shifter, constantly reinventing himself every few years.  Perhaps she got along so well with her shape-shifter, sometimes alien-looking Ziggy Stardust of a husband, because she was of necessity an alien shape-shifter herself long before she played one in Star Trek VI.

For example, at one point in the film, in order to escape her leg-brace in the mining level, Martia shape-shifts into a small blonde white-girl, which, given the way that whiteness continues to define American beauty standards (standards that Iman had to both conform to and resist throughout her modeling career), is almost a meta-commentary on the fashion industry itself in that moment.

When she, Kirk, and McCoy escape to the surface, she transforms into this large, Yeti-like monster to withstand the cold, then back to the sexy Martia we first met when they break for camp.  McCoy asks if "there is any way of knowing if this is the real you?" which had to have been a question that Iman was both asked--and asked herself--too often throughout her career.  She responds by paraphrasing Polonius to Ophelia: "I thought I would assume a pleasing shape," which is a strategy that, again, Iman doubtless had to often adopt just to survive the racial minefield that is Western modeling and unequal American power relations.

But Kirk isn't the only one for whom she's assuming a pleasing form; as Kirk soon realizes, she merely staged their escape for the benefit of the Klingons in exchange for a "full pardon", as part of a conspiracy to make it look like they were killed in flight from prison.  She even parodies her "pleasing shapes," wielding her shape-shifting as a weapon (as, again, Iman doubtless had to often) as she transforms into Kirk, then attacks him.

But alas, her strategy of conformity fails, as the Klingons vaporize her anyways when they find them, so as to ensure there are no witnesses to their conspiracy.  Kirk and McCoy are of course beamed out by the Enterprise in the nick of time, but not without leaving the viewer with a sour taste in the mouth for Martia, and the no-win situation that she (and so many women of color like her) has been placed in, as all the pressures to conform to "pleasing shapes" in a thousand contradictory ways still end in her being betrayed and disappeared.  Like Ophelia of yore, her attempts to please everyone please no one, ultimately causing her to disintegrate, tearing her apart, killing her quite literally.  Iman, fortunately, has had a happier time of it in real life than Ophelia, though many women, particularly women of color, have been far less fortunate.

The film itself is already problematic in other places, though at least more self-consciously: remember how the Klingon ambassador's daughter calls out the racism implicit in Chekhov's phraseology "inalienable human rights," or the moment when Spock in effect mind-rapes the double-agent Valeris in a non-consensual mind-meld to find out from her who the other co-conspirators are.  I have to wonder how consciously intentional the casting of Iman as a shape-shifter was in a film that already calls explicit attention to white and male privilege, ethnocentrism, paternalism, and unconscious racism.

A Very Belated Response to the Seahawk's Resounding Superbowl Victory

It's now been over two months.   Baseball season's started.  College basketball is in the Final Four.  There's been a massive mudslide in Snohomish county.  Washington's moved on.  Everyone's moved on.  Superbowl 48 has already passed on into legend--and will soon into myth--and is now mainly just a good way to cope through another mediocre Mariners season. 

So now that the confetti is long since cleaned up and sits disintegrating in some New Jersey landfill, what's the take away from all this?  Why do I keep circling back to that dominating win in my mind?  Why does it matter?

Before proceeding, let's be clear: it doesn't matter.  Of course not.  Some one-percenters gave each other concussions.  A bunch of Americans watched TV.  That's all that happened.  Nothing more.  Everyone who was sick, depressed, lonely, heart-broken, grieving, unemployed, etc, on February 2nd continued to be so on February 3rd--and even if they weren't anymore, it was surely for reasons unrelated to the Superbowl.

And yes, yes, Seattle's long, dark night of sports mediocrity has at last been broken in the major sports (sorry Soccer and WNBA), but what of that?  Seattle was already an awesome city to live in, the Superbowl didn't change that, or even could have changed that.

But what of the Cinderella story, of all those 3rd round, 5th round, 7th round, undrafted picks that made up the team roster, the Rudys who made the big show, the Island of Misfit Toys who won the Superbowl?  Surely there's something at least inspiring about that, right?  Most everyone can identify with the passed-over kids who turn around and win the big game.

Yet as we all know, it's not enough to merely win.  Plenty of Dr. Faustus's have sold their souls to win, and what hollow, miserable victories those have all been.  No, far more important is how you win.  And this, this is why the Seahawk's resounding Superbowl victory still matters to me, why it matters how they won:

Because they had fun doing it!  They didn't simply work hard (as though literally everyone else who makes it to the NFL didn't), they didn't merely commit or dedicate or other such joyless adjectives, no: they had fun playing football!  They recognized, refreshingly enough, that football really is just a game, and that the only valid reason to play it is because it's fun! 

That's what kept coming up in all those interviews, in all the post-game analyses of which I've read far too many: how Pete Carroll "kept it loose" in the locker-room, playing pick-up games of basketball with the players, spontaneously running routes with them on the field, playing their favorite music in practice, joking with them, playing with them. Remember that before the Superbowl, one of the most constant criticisms leveled against him (besides, you know, the USC stuff) was that this 62 year old looked like some sort of JV middle-school coach, jumping up and down along the sidelines and hollering and waving his arms about like a goofball.  There was none of the grim seriousness of, say, a Jim Harbough, or the dignified sense of destiny of some Vince Lombardi.  It seemed to genuinely offend some folks that Pete Carroll would treat the most popular sport in America for exactly what it is: a game!  That you play for fun! 

Consider Marshawn Lynch dancing to his favorite Oakland rap artists in the locker room and chomping down on skittles, and the easy rapport of the players (remember Doug Baldwin calling Richard Sherman "mediocre" at his own press-conference), the posturing, the "excessive celebration" that offended so many, the trash-talk, yes, even Sherman's, for as every athlete will tell you, trash-talk is part of the sport, part of the fun.  It's only an insult if you take yourself too seriously.

And the result of all this playfulness?  The Seahawks were loose, relaxed, and confident throughout the Superbowl, while the Broncos (whom I deep down suspect took themselves far too seriously) tightened up and collapsed.  A more serious-minded Seahawks squad, quite frankly, would probably have wilted in the face of the beatific aura of The Manning and all the historical weight he carried about him.

Bah!  Guys, it's just a football game!  The Seahawks knew this; they repeatedly said they played the Superbowl like it was just any other game.  It isn't some Arthurian Quest or Second Coming or World War III!  No lives are on the line.  Don't use your battle-field metaphors on me, as though we didn't already have real war to sober us: Football is just a sport, a game!  If you aren't just having fun when you play football, then you're doing it wrong!

Please don't misunderstand, I'm not trying to denigrate football here, quite the opposite in fact: for what the Seahawks resounding victory has reminded me is of the great importance of play, of just having fun, in all that we do!  Even in our most earnest endeavors, in the things we care about most--especially in the things we care about most--one must be playful if one is to do it at all!  When I teach college English, what I repeatedly tell my students is that, for as difficult and infuriating as the writing process can be, if you're not having fun when you write, then you're doing it wrong!  It's something I have to constantly remind myself, too.

Same thing goes for dancing, or music, or the arts, or even science, technology, math, medicine, and business--like sports, they all require great discipline and skill to excel at, but please don't forget that the whole reason you got into this game in the first place is because you enjoyed it!  Because it's fun!  And God help you if you ever forget that sense of fun: the Holy Spirit is offended, the heavens close, and Amen to the power and authority of that man.  You may even somehow still manage to win, but what a hollow victory that will be.

And the first step to having fun is to quit taking yourself so freakin' seriously!  When on Earth did we begin to think it was a virtue to be so serious all the time?  Why did we think it was better to be a miserable drudge during our limited days in this life?  Why are we so afraid to actually enjoy what we do?

So very few things in this life really deserve to be taken seriously.  Football isn't one of them.  Nor ourselves.  And as I stare down my growing pile of homework and research and all the pressure in academia to publish or perish and to anticipate the job market and follow the latest theories and the trendiest topics and to take my career oh so seriously--my how seriously!--I often have to remind myself how most of this doesn't matter either, that the reason why I got into this crazy field in the first place is: because it's fun!  And I deeply suspect that if I don't have fun with my reading and writing and thinking, then I'm doing it wrong, that I'll never succeed in this field (or any field for that matter) if I don't start playing, and enjoying myself more!

The Seahawks reminded me of this.

And that's why I keep circling back to the significance of the Seahawks convincing Superbowl victory: because the folks who just played for fun, the ones who actually enjoyed the game as a game, are the ones who won!  And they didn't just win, they won well!  For play and fun and joy aren't just mental necessities by which to keep our sanity in an increasingly insane world: play and fun and joy are how you actually succeed!  How much happier would our lives be if we quit taking ourselves so seriously, and just enjoyed the game for its own sake.