Friday, January 29, 2010

New Bible Review

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Next to Richard Cracroft, Mormondom ain't got a more revered reviewer than Jeffrey Needle (and he's not even Mormon!). He didn't like my Balaam play, but he loved the rest of the Bible, especially Ginsberg's "Moses und Aron" (though he does ask a question I've been meaning to for a long time: what's with that title, anyway?).

The review


Note: with this post, the All-New Foblog now has as many posts as the old Foblog has.

2 comments:

Association for Mormon Letters said...

Hey, just found my name used in vain....

It isn't that I didn't like the play. It's that I couldn't quite get a handle on why it was in the FOB Bible. Perhaps you can elaborate.

So much of the book was either satire or midrash. There was some midrash in your play, but nothing that really jumped out.

In fact, I quite liked the play. I just couldn't figure out what its inclusion in this collection was supposed to represent.

Th. said...

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I suppose.....

The purpose of the bible wasn't necessarily satirical or --- midrashical? The hope was to hit a wide variety of possible responses, from mere interpretation to actual satire, to new points of view, to recreation as superhero story. So in my mind at least, one work that stuck extremely close to the original text was necessary for intended breadth.

Reviews though have shown me that we weren't quite making the book we thought we were.

I'm okay with that though. Once something's in print, it is not, imho, the authors' anymore. It belongs to the readers. And what they say is right is right, what they say is wrong is wrong. And so it goes.