10 responses so far ↓

• 1 Lessie // Sep 19, 2008 at 11:42 am

  Alas, I had the misfortune to hear him speak at BYU-I when I was still in school. In one sentence he managed to disparage intellectualism, feminism, and gay rights. It was a painful moment, realizing that one of the better popular artists Mormons had managed to produce was such a bigot.
  On a different note, I heard him speak again at a writer’s conference there and he’s also an arrogant bastard.

• 2 markii // Sep 19, 2008 at 12:45 pm

  damn. i’m reading ender’s game right now with my daughter and we’re enjoying it. i just have to repeat the mantra “separate the art from the artist….separate the art from the artist”….

  thanks for posting this.

• 3 G // Sep 19, 2008 at 3:34 pm

  ya markii… I’ve got to keep that same mantra going too.
  okay, I haven’t read a whole lot of him, but I was very surprised to find how closed minded he is in real life, his fiction explores such edgy issues.

  (course, I did read Empire a bit ago… and that pretty much towed a rigidly conservative line.)

• 4 xJane // Sep 19, 2008 at 3:52 pm

  I have to admit to being a huge fan of Card’s work. My full screenname, xenocideJane, comes from his Speaker for the Dead books, including Xenocide and Speaker for the Dead. Having read bits of his Alvin Maker maker series and seeing nothing but contempt for religion in general, (Christian religion in specific) in most of his stories it came as a major shock to me that he is a fundamentalist Mormon who hates gays.

  While there may not be any gay characters in his books that I can remember, I also don’t remember a whole lot of sexuality. People simply were. And people were people, whether human, Maker, Pequenino, or Formic. To find such bigotry in his real life makes me wonder how he managed to write the characters I loved so much to begin with. Did he simply need to rid his head of the vile thoughts? Is there some part of him that wishes for a better world (I still like to think so)? Or does he just know what sells and how to make a buck?

  I’d be really interested to hear him reconcile the views expressed by him through the characters in his books and the views expressed by him in meat space.

  Lessie: that must’ve been quite a sentence.

  markii: just don’t tell your daughter what a horrid person the author is—let her enjoy the art as it stands until she works it out. I’m trying to come up with a valid parallel (here I shall invoke Godwin’s Law): anyone know any great Nazi artists?

  I was at a friend’s house recently and it was discussed that a public facility somewhere put up a statue of Michelangelo’s Moses but without the horns. He felt this was an attempt to erase the artist’s anti-Semitism, or the prevalent anti-Semitism of the artist’s time. (For myself, I had simply been told that they only looked like horns, they were really rays of God’s light; time had worn them down into the nubbins that survive today.)

• 5 Elaine // Sep 20, 2008 at 7:37 am

  Re: Michelangelo and Moses…That’s pretty much the story I got about the horns, as well, xJane. But there was omething about a mistranslation that led him to give Moses the horns.

  I don’t know. I kind of have a problem with people who mess with other people’s art in order to serve their own ideological purposes. Don’t display it if you (royal you; not “you”, xJane, of course) think it is ideologically impure, but don’t alter it to suit your own purposes. Don’t put fig leaves on the David, don’t edit the film to give it a more benign rating (I hear there’s a big business in that in Utah), that sort of thing.

  At the very least, when someone can match the genius of Michelangelo (or any other artist), then maybe…maybe…they have the right to alter that artist’s work. And that’s a huge maybe.

• 6 Bored in Vernal // Sep 20, 2008 at 5:11 pm

  Wait, wait!! I really loved OSC back in the day before he became really popular–I absolutely adored his early work. And as I recall it was chock full of sex and bizarre sexual themes and there was one book with a sympathetic treatment of a same-sex relationship. It’s been so long, I can’t remember what the books were, but I’ll try to look them up.

  I think his writing became more mainstream when he was hired by the Church to do some projects for them. Since that time he has been much more careful about what he writes. And the things he says publicly are carefully aligned with Church policy. But as I recall, he didn’t use to be that way.

  Unless I’m getting Alzheimer’s…

• 7 Bored in Vernal // Sep 20, 2008 at 5:21 pm

  OK, Songmaster is the one with the homosexual themes–go to the Wikipedia link and read about it. I love that book. The synopsis doesn’t do it justice at all. I suggest you all read it. It says more about people and life than any of his diatribes against same-sex marriage, and it almost redeems him from being an idiot.

• 8 Elaine // Sep 20, 2008 at 7:20 pm

  You know, it’s interesting. A few years ago, when I attended LosCon, OSC was the guest of honor. I attended several panels he was on and I also had occasion to meet him, albeit fairly briefly.

  He didn’t come off as nearly so intolerant as he has seemed in the past few years, and while he seemed a bit full of himself, this wasn’t any more pronounced than some of the other writers there…and that part of his personality seemed much more toned-down than a couple of the other writers who are often there.

  I’ve wondered occasionally what happened to him, to make him seem so much more not only intolerant but, I don’t know, more insistent on being loud and obnoxious about his intolerance. If the reason for his change is indeed that mentioned by BiV, I think that’s very sad.

• 9 G // Sep 20, 2008 at 9:55 pm

  this is gonna sound horrible… but I have wondered if he is gunning for an honorary GA seat like what was given to Gerald Lund, and that is why he has made this switch in his rhetoric.

• 10 xJane // Sep 21, 2008 at 8:19 am

  Oh, I remember Songmaster! I had forgotten it was Card. It really was a beautiful book about love—mostly undiscriminating. Before Heinlein, it was my first introduction to the concept of polyamory.

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