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.

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…

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.

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.)

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

thanks for posting this.