[Note: This review was published in Eerie Aunt Hums Spring 2001, the humor issue with Robert Kirby in a devil suit on the cover. William Morris, that rareyellow fellow praised it (Re: [AML] Spring 01 (Humor) Irreantum, 7/21/01), "I don't know that I would want all of the reviews in Irreantum to read like this one," and then something about a unique voice and hilarious (I think it was referring to the books under review -- I wish I could write humor; as they say, "Every dramatic or tragic actor yearns to play Petruchio"), but those above are the important words.

When I wrote the review I wanted to review Kirby's Sunday of the Living Dead, but didn't have time to finish it. I was going to work it into this post, but decided the newspaper column I reviewed did what I needed (and BN.com didn't have a ranking for Sunday) so I'll review Sunday of the Living Dead separately. Talking about satire is an interesting way to discuss an author's intentions and when and why they should matter to our interpretation of a work.]

Sung with Vim, Vigor, and a Delicate Tongue

While I like quotes, I don't like to memorize quotes, or anything else. In fact, I only know 2 phone numbers: home and work. And I can't tell you my home number without pushing number pads on an imaginary phone suspended in the air. Someone once said (I can't remember the quote) that the mind is a room you fill with furniture you're going to use, and the rest you put in the attic. Some rooms are sparsely decorated, others are filled to the brim with furniture so close together you can hardly move around, covered with assorted knick-knacks from the Franklin Mint placed on doilies. The room of my mind is piled high with discarded wads of paper, a chair, and little post-it notes telling me where to look things up.

-- Edgar Snow

Sounds like the room I write in, except the wads of paper are books and newspaper and knicks and knacks like a shelf I rescued from someone's garbage can, which would mount nicely in the space above where the door swings open. And somewhere in that pile of books is my copy of Of Curious Workmanship. Not where I last saw it every time I glanced over there for weeks and months. I'm beginning to think the other books kidnaped it and pass it from shelf to shelf to laugh over this or that passage, or over Snow's recommendations of what books to put in a 72-hour survival kit, or what the gift of tongues really is. (Think cow.)

The post-it notes telling us where to look is an image of one thing referring to another, or reminding of another, and that's how the book works. Ed Snow takes familiar phrases and shows them in unfamiliar ways. He considers the gift of tongues, and how he's never spoken in tongues, and gradually muses his way to a gift someone gave him on his mission: cow tongues.

Or he wanders through the old MIA song book, which included unintentionally provocative song titles, like Gilbert and Sullivan's "Tit Willow." Or he muses about how we sing in our congregations, compared to how the Swiss Saints in his mission sang. Here's the opening to "With Vigor and Vim,"

The other evening we were listening to a Primary Songs CD on our car stereo in order to put our kids to sleep when I thought I heard the lyrics, "Sing out with vigor and phlegm," causing me to wonder aloud whether these words had been translated directly from the old German language primary songbook Die Kinder Singen I knew from my Swiss Mission days. My wife politely suggested the word was "vim," whatever that meant, causing her to wonder whether I needed a hearing aid. No doubt it gave her a Father's Day gift idea.

When we got home I searched for a definition of "vim" in that great repository of information every Mormon in the '70s looked to before giving a talk -- not Mormon Doctrine, but Webster's Dictionary. Do you remember the days when orthodoxy could be measured by whether the opening line of your "2-/12 minute talk" was either (a) a Mormon joke (The Pope, Billy Graham and President Kimball were fishing one day when . . .), or (b) the definition of your theme pulled out of the dictionary, followed by (c) an unattributed theft from Golden Nuggets of Thought, a treasury of short talks each of which could conveniently be read aloud in about 2-1/2 minutes?

He goes on to muse about our lack of vigor in singing, we sing much too delicately, so it may seem strange in the review title to suggest this book sings with Vim, Vigor, and Delicacy. But it does. There's a lot of laughter here, a lot of foibles, but for all the foibles, and the vigor of the laughter, the humor is surprisingly gentle.

I was going to write, "surprisingly gentle compared to Robert Kirby's caustic humor," but caustic isn't the right word to describe Kirby's humor. Off and on for the next day I kept wondering how to describe it. Roughhousing is a word that comes to mind. Kirby is not particularly gentle, but he's not being rough to beat people up, just full of vim and vigor.

Other words that comes to mind are relentless and satirical. I was looking for a Kirby column in the Daily Herald archives (www.harktheherald.com) and didn't find it, but came across this one, "Dressing like a Mormon guy for only $39.93," which begins: "A while back, I was in the Church Office Building trying to get to the roof to take a picture of the top of angel Moroni's head for a Sunstone article. I mean, he looks gold from the street but you never know. He could really be a brunette." Note how Kirby sets up his satire poking fun at Sunstone, and peoples' perceptions of Sunstone, and setting the stage for some misadventures trying to get to the roof.

But he gets distracted by the way other passengers are dressed and starts musing about how to dress like a Mormon guy.

For starters, you'll need a tie tack, something that discreetly proclaims your inner self and keeps your tie from hanging in casseroles at ward eats. Most LDS males opt for a miniature of the Salt Lake Temple, angel Moroni, Eagle Scout award, or a paper clip. The most original tie tack I've ever seen on a Mormon was in a photograph of Elder J. Golden Kimball. His tie tack was a molar. Incidentally, this is the only Mormon fashion trend ever started by a General Authority that failed to catch on.

Kirby moves on to a sharper observation as he moves down the body, poking fun at both Mormon approaches to fashion and Mormon militancy:

Mormons are more conscious of price than they are of brand names. "Two for one" means more to us than Armani, who, if asked, most Mormons would say was a Book of Mormon prophet. Next up are shoes. Gucci is out (see Armani reference). So are Birkenstocks and Bass Weejuns. As a rule. Mormon guys prefer to be shod as if they were about to cross the plains again. Wing tips or mailman shoes are big. Combat boots may be allowed in some Montana wards, but definitely nothing two-toned or with tassels.

There's a lot of sharp satire in Kirby's work, much sharper than this piece, some of it. So much that some people miss the testimony in his work. (Not my spellchecker, though. It suggests choirboy as an alternative to Kirby.) The column I was looking for talked about his last few days before his mission, and starts out as a humor column, but contains a serious reference to Jesus saving his soul, which brought back that lovely moment in Brigham's Bees where the polygamous uncle is dying of lung cancer and utters his last word, with great love and savor, apparently a greeting, "Lord!"

Ed Snow's humor is not so sharp -- rather, as the sub-title suggests, it is "Musings on things Mormon," like the difficulty of correcting a typo when you're engraving on metal plates.

Enjoy it, and if you can afford the horrendous price, buy another one for the ward chorister, and ignore that reviewer behind the curtain complaining that Signature prices its literary offerings like it doesn't expect them to sell, prices them as if they were books of poetry from small presses that had to recoup the printing costs with relatively few sales, like Alicia Suskin Ostriker's The Crack in Everything, Pitt Poetry Series, U of Pittsburgh Press, $12.95, or Tess Gallagher's Amplitude (216 pages) Graywolf Press, $14.95.

I say ignore that ranting reviewer even as he points out that Ostriker and Gallagher have national reputations but their books ranked 313,202 and 367,754 on www.bn.com on the Ides of March, 100,000 behind Snow's (219,663), so someone must be buying it, so maybe they could lower the price on the second printing -- but, of course the fact that people are buying it proves the price doesn't deter buyers -- so they won't.

Ignore, I say, ignore that ranting reviewer who tries to make his case that Signature doesn't think this book will sell by pointing to Peggy Fletcher Stack and Kathleen Peterson's A World of Faith, which is only $5 more than Of Curious Workmanship, even though, by all accounts hardbound books with full color illustrations are much more expensive than 132 page paperbacks. Indeed in the national press, hardbound children's picture books sell for just $1 more than Of Curious Workmanship, (for example, Rick Walton and Jimmy Holder's Pig, Pigger, Piggest, and Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond's If You Give a Pig a Pancake). A World of Faith is 25% more than most children's hardbound picture books, but it's also twice as long, 64 leaves instead of 32. Clearly Signature thinks this book can compete on the national market.

Rant on, rant on, reviewer -- how does it rank at Barnes and Noble? (72,823, and BN gives it a 20% discount, which it doesn't give Snow's book). Oh, wait, there's a transition coming.

Humor testifies that people are human and humane enough to laugh at themselves. Humor is also a way of telling the outside world you exist as a culture with the foibles and mores and strangeness of any culture. Religion also testifies that a group is human, a distinct culture.

But if humor is sometimes full of phlegm and vigor so is religion. If humor sometimes wounds, religion sometimes counts other religions as an offense, destroying in tongues of fire or fiery mortar shells temples and statues and mosques and synagogues (gog, magog, synagogue, cinemagogue) that may have stood hundreds of years as someone's expression of faith.

There is another way of testifying about a culture's belief in God -- setting it among other cultures of belief and showing how the cultures together make up A World of Faith. That this is Stack and Peterson's rhetorical stance is clear to people who are familiar with religious polemics. For example, an astute reader of book covers, say of Walter Martin's The Kingdom of the Cults, or Anthony Hoekema's The Four Major Cults, will note that they're all here, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Christian Scientists, and Jehovah's Witnesses. Indeed, all the native American religions in the book, including Hopi, are religions the polemic writers of the immigrant Protestant religions would consider non-Christian, or heretical, or not mainstream.

But if there's a satiric edge to that last paragraph, there's no satiric edge to this book. It's a gently spoken celebration of the ways people all over the world worship their creator. Stack and Peterson have the good grace to dignify each religion, to let each speak through its own symbols and let each speak as a tradition of faith, a tradition that reaches towards God, or responds to God's reaching arms. (Look at the border on the front and back covers, can you spot the Mormon symbols?)

Each religion, from Amish, Baha'i, and Baptist to Unitarian, Yoruba, and Zoroastrian, has a two-page spread with a picture illustrating people and places from that tradition, and a border showing the tradition's symbols and motifs, a two paragraph account of the religion and a caption about the illustration. Here's the first paragraph about the Hopi:

In the beginning, say the Hopis, human beings lived underground, far below the surface of the earth. But they were crowded and constantly tripping over each other. So they made their way up through three different levels until they found a hole in the earth's surface. They climbed through the hole to see the sky and breathe the air. This world was the Fourth World. God told the humans that this world was not easy like the other three. It has height and depth, heat and cold, beauty and emptiness. Humans must choose the good, God said, and carry out the plan of creation. Then God left them, with only spirits or "kachinas" to guide them on their journey.

Kathleen Peterson's illustrations have the same beauty that made her illustrations for The Stones of the Temple such a fine companion (a help meet) to J. Frederic Voros Jr.'s lyrical celebration of Salt Lake's childhood. The illustrations here show a detail that bespeaks not only study of other cultures but a love and respect for what is sacred in those cultures.

The Pleasant Grove library has 3 or 4 copies of this book and I have probably checked them all out over the past several months as a way of prodding myself to write this review. I like to boost their circulation, too. I worked off a traffic ticket there once, and found that if a book is out on a table you don't reshelve it before scanning the bar code so that it becomes part of their circulation stats. I like to put a few books on the table every time I go. I don't know if it has a copy of Of Curious Workmanship, but if my other two or so thousand books ever get through passing it amongst themselves I'll finally shelve it and consider it well circulated.

I've been keeping my copy on the lip of the philosophy shelf, essays, rather than with humor in the other room, where it wouldn't constantly remind me I have a review to write, so I suspect the philosophers have made off with it. Thinking's hard work, and I hope it gives them enough rest that they can sing with a bit more vim. I'll ask them when we meet. After I drop by St. Peter's Deli first and pick up some tongue.

Harlow S. Clark, who, long about this time of year (or maybe 6 or 12 weeks later) starts imaging his garden and resolving that this year the weeds shall have no dominion.