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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 04/06/01 -- Vol. 19, No. 40
Chair/Librarian: Mark Leeper, 732-817-5619, mleeper@avaya.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper, 732-332-6218, eleeper@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist: Rob Mitchell, robmitchell@avaya.com
HO Chair Emeritus: John Jetzt, jetzt@avaya.com
HO Librarian Emeritus: Nick Sauer, njs@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-447-3652 for details. The Denver Area Science Fiction
Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of every month at
Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
===================================================================
1. Passover is coming up in the Jewish calendar. Back when I was
growing up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts there were a number of
Jewish families in my neighborhood. Most of them probably observed
the holiday and followed many of the required traditions in the
privacy of their own homes. One Jewish woman went beyond that
degree of observance.
There are certain foods that may be eaten in a Kosher house other
times of the year but are forbidden during Passover. Supposedly
Passover is feast holiday, but the Jews are a contrary people and
for reasons of their own when they have a feast, it is a feast of
food restrictions. You eat fewer foods and not more. Most of the
rules center around the story that the Israelites fleeing from
Egypt, as the holiday commemorates, did not have time to let their
bread rise, so took with them unleavened bread. In remembrance of
this inconvenience we take a similar inconvenience on ourselves and
eat only unleavened food.
I do not know where the tradition came from, but the really pious
people supposedly go through special ceremonies to get rid of the
last of the food that is not allowed so that no trace of it will be
in the house. You hunt for it with a feather used as a brush. You
search for the last crumbs of bread and other foods not allowed,
you take them outside and you burn them. Most people look on this
as only a quaint tradition. But when I lived in Longmeadow there
was one woman in the next street who actually went through this
ceremony. She would make a big deal of it and do it when other
people would see her doing it. Now in other respects she did not
follow the rules. She drove her car on Saturday. I do not
remember what else she did, but there were other ways in which she
broke rules that most of the rest of us did not follow.
Why did she decide to be so obedient to this one rule? It was easy
for her to do and she could play at being really pious. It happens
in any religion that you get competitions of one-up-manship. Look
how pious I am, I follow this obscure rule and you don't. But does
the rule really matter? The acid test I used at the time was this
one: "Who is better off and who is worse off for the person having
followed the rule?" To this question one answer is totally
unacceptable. That is "God." In this regard we can leave God the
Omnipotent to take care of Himself.
This Longmeadow woman's super-piety in this regard did not seem to
be helping or hurting anybody. I must have forgotten about this
woman for 35 years, but she came back to me when I was listening to
the news recently. The news story was that the Taliban in
Afghanistan announced they were going to destroy the ancient
colossal Buddhas. Almost immediately there was international
uproar. As soon as the news media got hold of the story the
Buddhas were doomed. It was only a matter of time.
The question was just how much time it would be. Even in a country
like Afghanistan the is readily at had the resources necessary to
destroy a work of art and religious devotion that may have taken
centuries to create. The Taliban could have gone our one night and
quietly obliterated the Buddhas. That would not have served their
purpose. They waited for the international news media to create
the greatest possible audience for the action, then went ahead and
brought the statues to the ground. The sad irony is that all of
the attempts to stop the Taliban only made the action of destroying
the statues more advantageous in their own eyes. It meant a bigger
audience to watch the act. The truth is that where the statues
were few people would be seeing them anyway. Afghanistan is not
exactly a dream vacation spot. Once people being to believe that
God's law, as they interpret it, is more than common decency,
argument is useless. The desire to win points with God is just
about the most powerful motivator in the world. Think what would
take to convince someone to walk out of England, across Europe, and
then fight a war in the Middle East. You could not pay someone to
go through all that, but people in their hundreds did it for what
they thought was the greater glory of God and a better seat in the
life to come. If there was any hope in reasoning with the Taliban,
and that might be a contradiction in terms, it would be to have
some UN delegation go quietly to them.
I think that this is a lesson we would do well to remember when
dealing
===================================================================
2. Wit (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: In spite of the title there is very
little humorous but a great deal that is
intelligent in this film that peels the layers
off of a woman going through an aggressive
therapy for insidious ovarian cancer. Even if
other filmmakers commonly looked at the process
of a slow and painful death, which they
certainly do not, this film would still stand
out for its intelligence. Mike Nichols has
always broken taboos. Rating: 8 (0 to 10),
high +2 (-4 to +4)
In the early and mid-1990s several consecutive years films made for
cable made my annual top ten films list. That stopped happening,
but there have still been some very good films being made for
cable. WIT is very likely to return to that tradition. This film,
directed by Mike Nichols takes a topic rarely handled in dramatic
film simply because it does not appeal to filmgoers. This is a
film about a slow and painful course of chemo-therapy. The main
character is Dr. Vivian Bearing (played by Emma Thompson), a
professor of English Literature specializing in the poetry of John
Donne. Donne's metaphysical poetry looking at life and death has
made Bearing an expert in those subjects in the poetic abstract.
But they have left her totally unprepared to consider those issues
in the concrete or for this world of hospital life. Highly
eloquent in intellectual matters she finds she cannot even clearly
describe the pains she is feeling. Further she is shocked at her
total loss of human dignity. She complains to the camera, but
rarely to other people. In the early scenes we are shocked by the
frank language that the doctors use to talk to her, but it is minor
compared to the indignities she will soon be facing. In one case
she talks to the camera while she is vomiting into plastic tray,
only to have the nurse come in and measure the volume she has
produced. She makes ironic comments to the hospital staff and
nobody ever appears to notice.
There is a little too much of the cliche in WIT. The hospital
experience causes Bearing to re-evaluate her approach to teaching.
Through her whole learning and teaching career, her approach to
poetry has been abstract and academic. That also her attitudes
about living seem much like those of her academic career. She has
no friends to visit her in the hospital. She has used
intellectualization as a refuge from emotions and now she is paying
the price. She alternately disparages the intellects of her
students and wishes she had treated them a little better.
Now she has to deal with a doctor, a former student of hers, who
uses that same unemotional approach in medicine when she needs as
much of the human touch as she can get but is treated as an object.
She finds her passion for Donne's poetry is mirrored by her
doctor's wonder at the processes of cancer. Her closest human
relationship is with Susie, her nurse, whose knowledge of English
literature is small, but who strongly believes in the personal
touch and in treating patients as humans rather than specimens.
There of moments in the object lessons Bearing gets in the hospital
that makes this story almost feel like A CHRISTMAS CAROL or PASSION
FISH. Through much of the film we see that Bearing academic and
personal lives seem so dry and joyless, one wonders why early on
she does not at least consider suicide.
WIT is a very powerful and frightening look at severe illness and
death. Certainly it stands among the best of films I have seen
this year. I rate it an 8 on the 0 to 10 scale and a high +2 on
the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
HO 1K-644 732-817-5619
mleeper@avaya.com
It is not cigarettes that are addictive. It is contributions from the tobacco industry that are addictive.
-- Sen. John McCain