A recent television series brings a grisly Mormon murder case to life, though questionable renditions of history overshadow its more thoughtful aspects.
I don’t fully understand the pressure, but I appreciate that you know what you’re talking about. The closest I can approach it is to say that I had a teacher in college who saw something good in me and gave me a couple of lifts up when I needed them. He also ran an informal study group, which I attended until he assigned Chairman Mao’s book “On The Correct Handling of Disagreements Among The People.” I read it and suffered an attack of disillusionment that shaped me more than the good deeds of the teacher who formed my approach to education - who taught me Aristotle and Plato and a lot more. He soon left being a professor, moved to California, and devoted much of his life to the blues - recordings and concerts.
Mao’s rule is as close as I can come to understanding the pressure that can be applied by an organized community. I’m lucky.
It’s unfortunate the “historical” flashes in the series are as you describe them. I love history, but I understand the difficulty. Film/video presents a thing as factual, or real, whether it is or not. One assumes the picture is “what is.” But it isn’t; history can’t be objective - you’ll never get the same story from two witnesses, let alone a community of witnesses; and what you get is only the story of what they see in the mind, in memory. David Lynch plays on that confusion between subjective and objective in his medium. But it sounds like the hammer doesn’t understand the medium. History remembered is subjective; objective history doesn’t exist. There is the event, and after that there is the image left in the historian's or witness’s mind, a picture of the remembered or retold event that is indistinguishable from “truth” or “fact,” but is neither.
My takeaway is that I’m going to read the book and pass on the video version. Because when you’re reading, your mind is always making allowances for the narrator; the reader’s mind is always adjusting the story’s inaccuracies or trying to pave the potholes. Reading is active; viewing is passive. Reading is sweaty, dirty, inky; viewing is air conditioned.
I love your reviews, and I have a better understanding of LDS because of these things you give us.
Oh, you're not being dense at all! You have encapsulated very well the advantages print has over visual media when it comes to reporting history. I do recommend the book quite highly (though I'm not sure offhand whether or not I included it in the bibliography for my memoir).
I don’t fully understand the pressure, but I appreciate that you know what you’re talking about. The closest I can approach it is to say that I had a teacher in college who saw something good in me and gave me a couple of lifts up when I needed them. He also ran an informal study group, which I attended until he assigned Chairman Mao’s book “On The Correct Handling of Disagreements Among The People.” I read it and suffered an attack of disillusionment that shaped me more than the good deeds of the teacher who formed my approach to education - who taught me Aristotle and Plato and a lot more. He soon left being a professor, moved to California, and devoted much of his life to the blues - recordings and concerts.
Mao’s rule is as close as I can come to understanding the pressure that can be applied by an organized community. I’m lucky.
It’s unfortunate the “historical” flashes in the series are as you describe them. I love history, but I understand the difficulty. Film/video presents a thing as factual, or real, whether it is or not. One assumes the picture is “what is.” But it isn’t; history can’t be objective - you’ll never get the same story from two witnesses, let alone a community of witnesses; and what you get is only the story of what they see in the mind, in memory. David Lynch plays on that confusion between subjective and objective in his medium. But it sounds like the hammer doesn’t understand the medium. History remembered is subjective; objective history doesn’t exist. There is the event, and after that there is the image left in the historian's or witness’s mind, a picture of the remembered or retold event that is indistinguishable from “truth” or “fact,” but is neither.
My takeaway is that I’m going to read the book and pass on the video version. Because when you’re reading, your mind is always making allowances for the narrator; the reader’s mind is always adjusting the story’s inaccuracies or trying to pave the potholes. Reading is active; viewing is passive. Reading is sweaty, dirty, inky; viewing is air conditioned.
I love your reviews, and I have a better understanding of LDS because of these things you give us.
Sorry if I’m dense here.
Oh, you're not being dense at all! You have encapsulated very well the advantages print has over visual media when it comes to reporting history. I do recommend the book quite highly (though I'm not sure offhand whether or not I included it in the bibliography for my memoir).