My story, “Allow Me to Introduce Myself,” that appeared in Monsters & Mormons has been ready for me to put up for sale for quite a while. I just haven’t gotten around to it. I hope to get that done before Christmas. Kidding. Not really. It won’t be on the Dunham site, so if you want to buy it from me (please do!) it’ll only be here, in the sidebar.
A Mormon nun battles demons and insecurity in the Louisiana bayou—with a baby alligator by her side and weapons powered by cold fusion.Read more →
My relationship with food is like having an abusive ex-boyfriend: He keeps coming back and coming back, every day, even though you don’t want to see him. You want to get rid of him but he won’t go away. It’s not an analogy of “I eat because I have to” and “I can’t really live without him.” It’s that you really don’t want want food in the house the way you really don’t want him to come back. That’s where the analogy stops. Read more →
The print books are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all the regular places.
The ebooks are available from me (see links above), Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all the regular places (iBooks coming soon). From now until May 15, 2014, they will be priced at $1.99. After, they will be $5.99 and $4.99 respectively.
I was doing a psych eval for clearance for a surgery I hope to have some time this coming summer, and the shrink said, “You don’t know how to relax, do you?” Why no. No, I don’t. I don’t remember the last time I had actual fun that didn’t involve guilt for being unproductive. Read more →
That awkward moment when you’re a book designer and you design your own books and the print is even too small for you. (The re-do added 100 pages to it.)
I have some things on my mind I’ve wanted to discuss, but my attention span these days is pretty rotten. I’ve been tweeting (and then Facebooking) way too long to be able to put a small essay together in a coherent fashion. Read more →
Tess: “But by that time, the boyfriend has used his seething hatred to make a billion dollars just to show her father up and comes back as a master of the universe to get his revenge on the parents and his girlfriend, even though she has never stopped loving him and was heartbroken that he never tried to contact her—”
Étienne: “This is the part where the evil parents had never passed his letters along to the girlfriend, right? And hers got waylaid on the way to the post office? And then she finds out her parents threw money at him to get him to go away, and she turns on them?”
Tess: “Right. So it’s all a giant drama, and the evil parents get their comeuppance.”
Étienne: “I don’t think we need to fear a raging billionaire coming after us in twenty years.”
Tess: [sighs dreamily] “I love those books.”
Étienne: “You know what I like about you, Tess?”
Tess: “Which thing?”
Étienne: “You’re worse at being human than I am. You just have a better filter.”
I don’t like Facebook. I never did. I wouldn’t even get on it to talk to my relatives. There was always something faintly nefarious about Facebook I didn’t feel with Twitter (which may simply be better at hiding it). I also didn’t like and didn’t understand either the interface or its functionality.
But I’m an author and as authors will do (or try), we must market. And marketing was happening on Facebook. And, not coincidentally, that’s where my fans were, too. I made a page. I have a personal account, too, that’s really not so personal. So I went there and I posted there. Then Facebook changed the way it displayed what I posted, which was to say, there was a precipitous drop in how many people were shown my posts from one day to the next. Facebook is doing Things, and those Things are cutting out the end user from stuff they want to see. Therefore, why should the content creators continue to supply content?
I will be ramping up my blogging again because there is no reason for me to be on a platform I hate if my readers won’t be shown what they have asked to see.
I will also be starting a newsletter for those who don’t care for blogs.
Because you know what? I have two (yes, two) books coming out on May 1, 2014, and I’d sure like people to know about them. Facebook’s not going to help you find out about them anymore.
“You’ve been smooth as a baby’s butt since you were gored three years ago,” Victoria said.
“You’re supposed to be smooth,” Emilio replied, suddenly irritated. “That’s the point.”
“Yes, but! Your posture isn’t quite straight enough when it should be and your shoulders aren’t back quite far enough and you don’t lean in quite close enough to the bull. When you go down on one knee, you’re right in his blind spot. When you make the kill, you go a little too far left and you have to reach for it. Your veronicas are a little too studied, and I haven’t seen you do a mariposa in, oh, years. Your faenas are a little too cautious, the time it takes you to turn the bull a little too long, and the horns are a little too far away from your legs.”
His mouth had dropped open with her first criticism.
“Every time I’ve seen you, you’ve left the ring without a drop of blood on you. Everybody else might like watching a torero do a perfect Viennese waltz with a bull and leave the ring pristine, as evidenced by your standings this season, but I don’t. I want to see a paso doble, but now if I want to see a good one, I have to watch Strictly Ballroom. Again.”
I have been increasingly frustrated with the way Facebook has been hiding what I post from people who have requested to see what I say. For those of you who don’t know (maybe don’t even care), this is a good explanation: Getting Facebook Slapped: Understanding Facebook’s Big Lie
Pertinent points:
FB uses the data its users provide and have been providing for 10 years to advertise to you. But there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, so they get what they deserve—ads.
On the other hand, users have been providing free labor to collect the data for other purposes. FB users perform very valuable work for free.
FB’s raison d’être was to allow users to “Connect with Your Friends • Discover and Learn • Express Yourself • Control What You Share • Stay Connected with Your Friends on Mobile Devices” except … now you can’t. Because it won’t let you.
The users who built the database, collected the followers, followed the brands, participated in the community, are being stabbed in the back. It happened overnight. One day you reached all the people who opted in to see your page. The next day, you didn’t.
Unless you pay to boost your posts. Except … you don’t know if FB is lying to you or not because there is no third-party verification of stats. Except … it’s the work the FB users did. FB users are expected not only to build the database, but to PAY to use it.
My personal experience is the same, but what keeps my rage fueled are the DAILY emails from FB reminding me to post on my page. Really?
I am not posting on my page anymore and this is why: Nobody sees it. Not even the people who requested to. Yet FB wants me to continue to support my brand on FB by nagging me to do it.
No.
For a moment, Facebook was the only good game in town, which was why many of us were stuck here. However, once the users (not the page owners who are being throttled) realize they’re not getting the information they want, they’ll leave.
Someone sent me to an interesting article on a book I haven’t read, The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset. I hesitated to write this because I haven’t read the book, but I’m actually commenting on the post itself.
“The Smartest Book About Our Digital Age Was Published in 1929. How José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses helps us understand everything from YouTube to Duck Dynasty.”
Are you, like me, puzzled to learn that Popular Science magazine recently shut down comments on its website, declaring that they were bad for science? Are you amazed, like me, that Duck Dynasty is the most-watched nonfiction cable show in TV history? Are you dismayed, like me, that crappy Hollywood films about comic book heroes and defunct TV shows have taken over every movie theater? Are you depressed, like me, that symphony orchestras are declaring bankruptcy, but Justin Bieber earned $58 million last year?
Why yes, I am wondering what’s up with Duck Dynasty. I AM pissy about the constant retreads coming out of Hollywood. I AM annoyed that Justin Bieber can finance a country’s worth of symphony orchestras. (I’m not really sure about the Popular Science thing, though.)
All is well. I’m intrigued. I’m invested in this piece. I’m even slightly nodding at this:
Put simply, the masses hate experts.
It’s so true! They so do!
But there’s a little tickle in the back of my mind at the use of the word “experts.” Then come a few more phrases that make me squirm a little.
If forced to choose between the advice of the learned and the vague impressions of other people just like themselves, the masses invariably turn to the latter. [ … ] The upper elite still try to pronounce judgments and lead, but fewer and fewer of those down below pay attention.
Huh.
Experts.
Learned people.
Upper elite.
Ortega couldn’t have foreseen digital age culture, but he is describing it with precision. [ … ] He would understand why Yelp reviews have more influence than the considered judgments of restaurant reviewers. He would know why Amazon customer comments have more clout than critics in The New Yorker. [ … ] a friend who is affluent, educated, and a noted wine connoisseur. [who] now relies more on wine advice from websites where anyone can post their evaluations of different vintages.
And this is where the article loses me, but not because I’m in high dudgeon over the key words.
There are several practical/pragmatic variables here that the author of the piece hasn’t accounted for:
product accessibility
expert accessibility
artificial restrictions to #1 & #2
fallibility of experts
accessibility of product and information
unfulfillment of desires
1. The masses aren’t likely to have access to the restaurants a critic would. They may not have access to the symphony. They may not have access to wine.
2.
a. The masses aren’t going to be reading reviews of restaurants they can’t afford to go to. Further, before Google, one had to know where to look for this information, and one isn’t likely to look for that information for places they can’t afford.
b. There are only so many experts for so many things that we as a culture experience or want to experience. Not every book can be reviewed, much less in the New York Times, the holy grail of book review sections. There are not enough restaurant critics or column inches to review every eatery in any given town.
3. The point of an expert review isn’t to educate or recommend or dissuade or make such things desirable/accessible to the masses. It’s to put up a wall between the “experts,” “learned people,” “elite” and the masses. It’s a bright line: This is our turf. Do not cross. Who chooses which books and restaurants and wines get the column inches? The experts, the learneds, and the elites, who have absolutely no interest in talking to the masses at all. Those column inches are jealously guarded.
“Amateur” reviews on Yelp and Amazon are plentiful and varied. Every thing that the masses are interested in have an opinion behind them that they can use to evaluate their own choices. There are no column inch limits. There are no carefully curated lists, leaving off what the masses are actually interested in.
4. Experts. Now there’s an interesting concept. Expert. One who is more learned in X thing than all the other learneds in X thing. A synonym is “consultant.”
Except the masses have seen the experts. They have listened to the experts. They keep listening to the experts, because the experts are more learned than they are—and they know it.
And then … what they see is that the experts are wrong quite a bit of the time. They are confused. “This expert is saying X, and I want to believe him, but my lying eyes are telling me something else. Which one do I believe? DAMN MY LYING EYES!”
So they go on about their business because, in the grand scheme of things, people aren’t going to change if something’s working for them, even if an expert tells them they’re wrong, even if they want to believe that the expert is right. They’d rather just live with their vague feeling of being wrong because they can’t reconcile the viewpoint of the expert with their own experience.
5. The masses will go for what’s accessible, be it product or information, and they will turn away from carefully curated lists to find what they actually want. If they don’t find what they actually want, they’ll go for a substitute. Miley Cyrus is not Britney Spears is not Madonna is not Cher. But Madonna’s a decent substitute for Cher, and Britney’s a decent substitute for Madonna, and Miley Cyrus is—
My apologies to Britney, Madonna, and Cher.
Not only are these things accessible, they are in their faces. I do not see experts in their faces, giving them a reason to find a more erudite alternative.
6. The masses can’t make what they really want to have, what their ears and eyes want, so they have always had to take what they can get, whether they like it or not.
This is why genre self-publishing has taken over NY genre publishing. People found authors who will give them what they already know they want, but were not being provided. Authors don’t make tastes and trends. People who are looking for stories that resonate make those tastes and trends. Publishing takes pride in its gatekeeping, but it has a lousy record on what people actually want.
The article goes on with this:
The same people who denounce expert opinion about movies or music will praise a skilled plumber or car mechanic.
An expert opinion about movies or music is just that: an opinion. It has no basis in skill or objective measure. Further, movies and music are not staples of life; they are spices.
A skilled plumber will come out in freezing weather to replace a hot water heater. A skilled car mechanic will keep a piece-of-shit car running so someone who can’t afford a new car can get to work to feed their families.
How is this apples-and-Volkswagen comparison being made without irony and with a straight face?
The value of blue-collar expertise is accepted without question. The same people who get angry when I make judgments about the skill level of a pianist, would never question my decision to pay more to hire a superior piano tuner.
Shocking.
This is a peculiar state of affairs …
No it’s not. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is to be part of the masses.
At one point in The Revolt of the Masses, he complains about a woman who told him “I can’t stand a dance to which less than 800 people have been invited.” So how would the Spanish philosopher respond to the crowd mentality that seeks out viral videos with a hundred million views?
This is not difficult to comprehend. There are more people to choose from. This is not analogous to how many people vote for a YouTube video. This is analogous to having a billion YouTube videos to choose from.
Lastly, some more vocabulary:
… the possibility for barbarism to flourish in tandem with technology; or the unbalanced specialization which favors science over the humanities; or (in his words) “the loss of prestige of legislative assemblies.”
Barbarism.
Unbalanced.
Not prestigious.
The masses are asses. My dad used to say that when observing what made popular culture. The case can be made, yes. Mobs have regularly shown themselves to be asses.
I’m not above making judgments on the taste of the masses, although I’ve learned that it’s wise not to do it publicly.
But to say that the masses are asses because they don’t listen to the experts is missing the point: they know who the experts say they are, but they don’t trust their advice and they know that the self-proclaimed experts aren’t there to sweep them into culture and a better appreciation of the humanities.
The experts are there to keep them out.
“In the Garden of Allah” by Don Henley
It was a pretty big year for fashion
A lousy year for rock and roll
The people gave their blessing to crimes of passion
It was a dark, dark night for the collective soul
I was somewhere out on Riverside
By the El Royale Hotel
When a stranger appeared in a cloud of smoke
I thought I knew him all too well
He said: “Now that I have your attention
I got somethin’ I wanna say
You may not wanna hear it
I’m gonna tell it to ya anyway
You know, I’ve always liked you, boy
’Cause you were not afraid of me
But things are gonna get mighty rough
Here in Gomorrah-By-The-Sea”
He said: “It’s just like home
It’s so damned hot, I can’t stand it
My fine seersucker suit is all soakin’ wet”
And the hills are burning
The wind is raging
And the clock strikes midnight
In the Garden of Allah
“Nice car … … …
I love those Bavarians … … so meticulous
Y’know, I remember a time when things were a lot more fun around here
When good was good, and evil was evil
Before things got so … … fuzzy
Yeah, I was once a golden boy like you
I was summoned to the halls of power in the heavenly court
And I dined with the deities who looked upon me with favor
For my talents; my creativity
We sat beneath the palms in the warm afternoon
And drank the wine with Fitzgerald and Huxley
They pawned a biting phrase
From tongues hot with blood
And drained their pens of bitter ink
Vainly reaching for the bottle of empty Edens
Branded specially for the ones
Who had come with great expectations
To the perfumed halls of Allah
For their time in the sun”
We were stokin’ the fires
And oilin’ up the machinery
Until the gods found out we had ideas of our own
And the war was coming
And the earth was shaking
And there was no more room
In the Garden of Allah
“Today I made and appearance downtown
I am an expert witness, because I say I am
And I said, ‘Gentleman … and I use that word loosely … I will testify for you
I’m a gun for hire, I’m a saint, I’m a liar
Because there are no facts, there is no truth, just data to be manipulated
I can get you any result you like … what’s it worth to ya?
Because there is no wrong, there is no right
And I sleep very well at night
No shame, no solution
No remorse, no retribution
Just people selling t-shirts
Just opportunity to participate in this pathetic little circus
And winning, winning, winning”
It was a pretty big year for predators
The marketplace was on a roll
And the land of opportunity
Spawned a whole new breed of men without souls
This year, notoriety got all confused with fame
And the devil is downhearted
Because there’s nothing left for him to claim
He said: “It’s just like home
It’s so low-down, I can’t stand it
I guess my work around here has all been done”
And the fruit is rotten
The serpent’s eyes shine
As he wraps around the vine
In the Garden of Allah
Étienne’s ex-father-in-law: “I have faith in you, Étienne. You can fix anything. I would like to see my two favorite people together again. And building. You become gods when you build together.”
Oui. Gods. They most certainly had been.
Once.
WE WERE GODS A Dunham Novel
Release date: May 1, 2014
Étienne looked down at his pop can. “I’m building a time machine,” he said abruptly.
Knox snorted in amusement.
He shrugged. “I won’t be able to. If people could travel through time, it’d be— The universe would implode. The Big Bang theory? Totally true. It was because somebody traveled through time.”
That day was November 6, 2013. I finished it December 8, 2013.
I haven’t done THAT since I was working graveyards at a convenience store, but Sabrina Darby kept poking at me.
Whatcha workin’ on?
NOTHING! I’M DRY AS A BONE! DUNHAM DRAINED MY WELL! I’LL NEVER WRITE AGAIN!!!! WAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
So … what’s in your idea folder?
OH, FINE. Here’s a list. I don’t know what to do with ANY of this stuff.
Tell me about THIS one. It seems most fully developed.
It’s just sketches. I have no idea what to do with it.
Hmm. *reads* So, um, why does X character do Y thing?
And that was pretty much all it took to start dumping in email at her and then I started sketching and next thing I knew, it was November 30 (end of NaNoWriMo) (no, I didn’t have any intention of doing NaNo) (no, I didn’t do it FOR NaNo), and I only had one scene to finish.
It is 95,000 words long. It has no title. It has no playlist. It has no cover. It has no release date.
But here I am telling you about it because, well … You know that scene in The Proviso where Giselle’s looking at the little blue lines on the pee stick and getting a weird feeling in her stomach?
Yeah, that.
But what it does have is a rough blurb and excerpts I’ve been posting on Facebook, but I’d rather not punish non-Facebook fans by doing that. So … here’s me naked.
So to speak.
Nineteen-year-old fresh-faced Mormon missionary Étienne Dunham LaMontagne, engineer, inventor, was always easy to love, but he was a nightmare to live with—his brilliance, pirate-king beauty, and penchant for high drama exhausted everybody who loved him. There was only one girl who could do it—seventeen-year-old budding green architect Mi-Kyung Tess Chun, with her visionary genius, flamboyant beauty, and penchant for bringing on the crazy.
Until she couldn’t.
Twenty years and five children later, her genius is gone, ground fine as talc under the unrelenting heel of life as a wife, mother, cleaning service, chauffeur, Relief Society president, and Étienne’s personal handler. It was exhausting. And she had exactly five groundbreaking buildings to her name—built with Étienne when she was young and stupid in love and bringing the crazy.
And Étienne—well, he hadn’t wanted a wife, mother, cleaning service, chauffeur, Relief Society president, or personal handler. He wanted the visionary architect and voracious lover he’d married who asked him to build things he had no idea how to build to power her buildings. He resented that somewhere along the way, she had allowed her vision to crumble in favor of dusting miniblinds and baseboards.
They part company bitterly, all that love and genius and drama wrapped up in cold divorce papers, their complaints unintelligible to the other.
Five years later, Étienne is utterly humbled after having built Whittaker House—a disaster of a building—with an average architect. The shame of it sent him traipsing around the world with his oldest—and very angry—son. Along the way, he’s learned a thing or two about functioning in the world on its terms instead of his. When his youngest daughter begs him to come home to check on his oldest daughter, he does so reluctantly, only to find himself cleaning up the mess her life has become—something he couldn’t have done five years before.
Tess’s vision has returned and she is again on top of green energy architecture, her flamboyance tempered but her vision strengthened, broadened, lengthened with time, age, and maturity. But she’s still a mother, and her now-adult children have problems of their own—serious problems. Her oldest son has been missing for five years. One of her low-maintenance children has severe antepartum psychosis. Her youngest daughter dropped out of high school.
Tess was exhausted being Étienne’s keeper, but once free of her, he’s learned how to be a normal human being.
Étienne resented Tess for letting her vision disappear, but once free of him, her vision has returned.
But even separated by distance and time, they never stopped loving each other. It’s just that sometimes … love isn’t enough.
I have been very unhappily mostly silent about this for two years now, but one of her latest blog posts, “A Reviewer’s Confession,” has me seeing red and I’ll be damned if I sit silent any longer.
In this confession, she said:
Only once did I give a book a one star rating and that was because the language was filthy and the author hadn’t researched LDS policy. (The author came unglued over my rating!)
Oh, Jennie. Honey. You haven’t seen unglued yet.
Why? Because you gave me that rating not actually having read the book. How do I know this? Because this:
the author hadn’t researched LDS policy
is patently untrue.
If you had read past the one-page prologue you would know that.
My journalism training had qualified me as a critic …
Apparently you didn’t learn how to check your facts (or other reviews) before opening your mouth.
You also probably don’t grok that part of the temple recommend interview where the bishop asks you if you’ve been honest with your fellow man. Or else you were honest and you don’t have a temple recommend.
I don’t know if you were part of the judging panel for the Whitney Award committee or not, but if you were, that adds another layer of fraud to your pattern of behavior for this book—and is the catalyst for my having come unglued at your “review.”
You lied about reading my book.
In church vernacular, then, I challenge you to:
1) actually read the book and rescind your lie
OR
2) declare publicly that you read the entirety of Magdalene. Anywhere will do: your blog, Goodreads, my blog, Meridian magazine.
But before you attempt #2, I want to direct your attention to Scott Hales’s review [dead link] (he who is also a respected scholar of Mormon literature), the Exponent II review, and the Publisher’s Weekly review, all of which refute your claim that I did not research church policy.
You lied about reading that book, Jennie. That by itself is dishonorable and worthy of contempt. If you were assigned to read it for the Whitneys, you also tarnished the integrity of the awards.
My story, “Allow Me to Introduce Myself,” that appeared in Monsters & Mormons has been ready for me to put up for sale for quite a while. I just haven’t gotten around to it. I hope to get that done before Christmas. Kidding. Not really. It won’t be on the Dunham site, so if you want to buy it from me (please do!) it’ll only be here, in the sidebar.
My relationship with food is like having an abusive ex-boyfriend: He keeps coming back and coming back, every day, even though you don’t want to see him. You want to get rid of him but he won’t go away. It’s not an analogy of “I eat because I have to” and “I can’t really live without him.” It’s that you really don’t want want food in the house the way you really don’t want him to come back. That’s where the analogy stops. 
I’m asking a question, but I’m not sure I’ll understand any responses I’ll get.
Tess: “You know this makes us like 
I don’t like Facebook. I never did. I wouldn’t even get on it to talk to my relatives. There was always something faintly nefarious about Facebook I didn’t feel with Twitter (which may simply be better at hiding it). I also didn’t like and didn’t understand either the interface or its functionality.
“You’ve been smooth as a baby’s butt since you were gored three years ago,” Victoria said.
![Review of my book MAGDALENE by Jennie Hansen. Text: “Disjointed, sloppy writing. Lacks real knowledge of Mormons and leadership in the Church. Too much vulgarity for vulgarities [sic] sake makes this story crude and amateurish.”](https://moriahjovan.com/talesofdunham/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/20130910_hansengr.jpg)