THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
12/31/04 -- Vol. 23, No. 27 (Whole Number 1263)
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
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Topics:
Correction
The Sharper Image (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Letters of Comment (by various people)
A LOVE SONG FOR BOBBY LONG (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
OPTICAL ILLUSIONS by Lisa Endlich (book review
by Joe Karpierz)
MONEYBALL by Michael Lewis (audio book review
by Joe Karpierz)
This Week's Reading (THE HORUS KILLINGS; OUT OF THE FLAMES;
and SHALOM, JAPAN) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Correction
Last week I mistakenly attributed a letter of comment to *Fred*
Leisti. It was from *Frank* Leisti. (I did get the name right in
the text body, if that means anything.) [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: The Sharper Image (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
As I write this I am on a plane to Nevada and looking at the
Sharper Image catalog that the airlines has provided. I see
several items for sale that tie into either fantasy or into recent
issues of the VOID. One is that for $50 a piece you can get
authentic drive-in movie speakers. I talked a while back in the
VOID about this sort of speaker. I don't think these drive-in
speakers were known for their tone. I seem to remember that if
you turned up the volume frequently the sound would cut out
altogether due to bad connections inside. Well, dogs chewed the
cord, kids spilled their Cokes on them. You expect them to show
some wear. It is a sad thing that they are disassembling drive-in
theaters and selling off these parts.
In the catalog they are also selling The One Ring from LORD OF THE
RINGS. They have done it in solid gold. If you are wondering, it
will cost you $295 to get The One Ring but quantity discounts are
available if you want to buy several of the One True Ring. Buy
yourself a One True Ring and then be ready when your best friend
tries to kill you for it. I wonder if they will sell you pieces
of the True Cross.
The same catalog also offers "King Arthur's Excalibur--The sword
extracted from the stone, making a boy a king." That's what they
say. I don't know how accurate the decoration on the sword is.
To me it looks like it must be from some later era. That may be
acceptable. Malory's version of the Arthur story is full of
anachronisms. But they will have a hard time convincing me they
know anything about the Arthur legend if they conflate the two
important swords in Arthur's life. Arthur received Excalibur from
the Lady in the Lake in recognition of his purity. I don't know
what happened to the Sword in the Stone but it did not become
Arthur's legendary sword. It was not Excalibur. In the film
EXCALIBUR they try to merge the two legends by saying it was
Uther, Arthur's father, who got Excalibur from the Lady in the
Lake and then it ended up in the stone through misuse. That is a
clever idea to simplify the story. But Uther would never have
been given Excalibur, the symbol of divine purity. Uther was
anything but divinely pure and notice Arthur was an illegitimate son.
Flipping to later in the catalog there is a course in learning a
language via immersion. You speak nothing but that language so
you pick it up conversationally. The languages they offer include
Latin. Is there still a conversational Latin that people learn
and immerse themselves in? I mean this side of Oxford.?
Then there is a scooter offered. I am not talking about a motor
scooter. I mean a scooter like I had as a kid. They have chromed
it up and made it look fancy but it is still a scooter. Now
almost my whole life I have thought of scooters as what kids use
before they could balance on a bicycle. Showing an adult on a
scooter looks a little retarded. Besides, it is not a real
scooter unless it is red and ends up rusting in a garage.
Besides, the scooter boom is over. I think it went the way of the
Segway almost-boom.
What else do we have? Well they have a dog translator. You put
this thing around a dog's neck. It fastens to his collar. It
transmits to a portable pocket unit one of 200 messages your dog
may be speaking to you. I wonder if one is "No, wait, that's not
what I said." How do you verify what a dog is really saying? If
you could tell what the dog meant, you wouldn't need a translator.
I'm just suspect that if I got one for a dog all he would have to
say to me is "I love you Master. You are so cool. I think you
should shop at Sharper Image." I hate to be skeptical but I think
that sometimes a woof is just a woof. I don't want to know what a
dog is really thinking. I think that a lot of dogs are probably
insincere sycophants anyway. I think what dogs tell each other is
"look, he may be a turkey, but he has opposable thumbs and we
don't, so stay on his good side and bide your time. Someday I
have to have my own pack. Then we'll take him down and the
biscuits will be OURS." I think we have only a fuzzy view of what
dogs think. That would be the real sharper image.
In the meantime you can probably buy your dog a classy post for
your back yard for your dog to anoint. A genuine drive-in movie
speaker post. Speakers not currently included. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Letters of Comment (by various people)
Responding to Mark's simple question in the 12/10/04 issue ("When
I decide to lift my arm there is a first atom in my arm that
moves. What force is acting on that atom and how am I creating
that force?"), Tom Russell writes, "All those who do not believe
in 'mind over matter,' please raise your right hand."
Joe Karpierz wrote in his review of HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF
THE PHOENIX in the 12/24/04 issue that he did not know what
"N.E.W.T." stood for. David Goldfarb has the answer: "I don't
think it's mentioned anywhere in book 5, but somewhere in book 1
or 2 it's given as 'Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Test'. (Possibly
the most contrived acronym since 'Supreme Headquarters,
International Espionage, Law Enforcement Division', which has
nowadays been changed to 'Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage
Logistics Directorate'.)"
===================================================================
TOPIC: A LOVE SONG FOR BOBBY LONG (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: A young woman whose mother has died shares a home with
two alcoholics who were friends of her mother. Their love of
literature and their passion for life wears away at her suspicion
and cynicism. The film has thick New O'leans texture, but there
is never any question where the film is going. Rating: +1 (-4 to
+4) or 6/10
A few years ago I was asked who my screen heroes were. I chose
Thomas More from A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS and Mr. Singer from THE
HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER. When I saw the tagline for Bobby Long
was "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" I had hoped that this film
would share the same style and values of that film. Sadly, it
shares far to little. It has some of the tone and little else.
It is thematically very different.
A LOVE SONG FOR BOBBY LONG starts out by showing us some people
who you would cross the street to avoid and then tries to convince
us to love these characters in spite of themselves. The action of
this story begins with the death of a singer, Lorraine Will. The
death brings together three people. They are two close friends of
Lorraine and her estranged eighteen-year-old daughter. It takes a
good long time before we realize that the title's Bobby Long
(played by John Travolta) is into anything more than liquor (vodka
and pickle juice???) and cigarettes and the occasional good book.
Scarlett Johansson plays Pursy Will who moves into her dead
mother's New Orleans house and finds two alcoholics already living
there. She resents their former relationship with her mother,
their pointless existence (little worse than hers), and their
vulgarity. She is determined to throw these two hangers-on from
the home she thinks she has inherited.
Bobby Long it seems is an ex-professor of literature who retreated
from the world into a self-destructive life style. Lawson Pines
(Gabriel Macht) is an aspiring novelist whose has worked for years
on a novel that is still not good enough. In this tumbledown
house full of books Persy comes to know and go from hostility to
love for these two devotees of great books and petty vices.
Beyond Lawson's minimal efforts on his novel the two men seem to
have given themselves over to drinking, sitting around, and giving
each other inebriated wisdom. Persy openly resents these two men,
but everybody knows or at least suspects where this story is
going. The film proceeds to that end with the mood and pace of a
blues song.
Travolta, with white hair, is trying to look like a man of letters
who is trying to be a bum. The man of letters part seems strained
but with the bum he goes over overboard. He and a circle of
friends sit on junkyard furniture and Bobby pontificates, quotes
major authors, and picks at a guitar. Travolta the actor is
having a great time. Scarlett Johansson seems better suited to
the acidic Perslane than to some of her previous roles.
In the end the film works or fails to work on the premise that
someone with a love of great literature has Soul or something like
it. But the film simply misses making Bobby Long as impressive or
as likeable as the script calls for him to be. I suppose I
consider his field of literature a better choice than rock music
or drugs. But if freshman director Shainee Gabel--adapting the
novel OFF EAST MAGAZINE ST by R. E. Capps--wants to convince us
that Bobby Long is in some way admirable or even is not wasting
his life, she fails.
The game of "identify the quote" adds a little fun to the film but
over all this seems a vanity piece for Travolta. He is
unconvincing as a great lover of literature. His singing sounds
better to him than to me. The film is a good try, but it does not
do what it sets out to do. I rate A LOVE SONG FOR BOBBY LONG a +1
on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: A valiant attempt to do this Shakespeare play while
undercutting the story's prejudice, but Al Pacino's acting style
is all wrong for the 16th century. Michael Radford tries
valiantly but only semi-successfully to subvert and redirect
Shakespeare's intent. Visually the film is quite impressive.
Rating: +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
Michael Radford adapts the controversial Shakespeare play THE
MERCHANT OF VENICE, perhaps the hardest of the Bard's plays to do
today. The issue inevitably arises as to the story's apparent
anti-Jewish nature. Radford's adaptation tries boldly to minimize
its anti-Jewishness. He shows Venetian society of the late 16th
century to be far more vicious toward Jews than the Jews were in
return. Short of not adapting the play at all--and nobody is
advocating dropping the play from the Shakespeare repertoire--
there is little that can be done to eliminate the negativity
toward Jews altogether. It would be a pleasant fantasy that
William Shakespeare did not intend THE MERCHANT OF VENICE to be
anti-Jewish and intentionally left ambiguity in the play so that
it could be interpreted positively. In my opinion a reading of
the play does not give that as the intention of the playwright.
However, great actors have, from time to time, tried to take the
role of Shylock and distort it sufficiently to make him seem
honorable and upstanding. The simple fact is that Shakespeare was
a man of his time and possessed attributes that today would be
interpreted as faults. In spite of Shylock's protestations
earlier in the play, in the courtroom scene it is very difficult
to interpret him as having any decency. The best an actor can do
is put as much emphasis as possible into the "Hath not a Jew..."
speech and then underplay the courtroom scene.
Al Pacino, however, cannot underplay any scene. In the courtroom
scene he is as detestable as Shakespeare would have wanted.
Pacino has a very forceful presence. And though he is a good
actor in a 20th century role, in my opinion he is much less
appropriate for historical roles. Radford disproves the syllogism
"Shylock requires a good actor. Pacino is a good actor.
Therefore Pacino would be a good Shylock." He can possibly look
right, but his voice style is all wrong.
Radford beautifully recreates Venice of 1586 with its somber
chambers and its bare-breasted prostitutes. But the mood of light
frivolity that Shakespeare intended for this "comedy" would be
impossible for any director to achieve in the modern world.
The attempt to use modern diction is only partially successful.
Listening seems more effort than it was in MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING,
which is my standard for making Shakespeare accessible. Also,
perhaps Portia should have been cast as someone who could be a
little more masculine-seeming. Lynn Collins is much too feminine
to convincingly be taken for a male. I have said little about
Jeremy Irons. His role curiously is not that pivotal. The only
scene in which he does something noteworthy is when he spits on Al
Pacino's Shylock. The part calls for someone who can spit on a
Jew and still retain audience sympathy. Few could do it and the
usually urbane Irons seems wrong. It is hard to think of Irons as
anything but an elegant gentleman far above spitting on other
people. Perhaps he carries with him too much dignity from
previous roles. It is like seeing Laurence Olivier in a nude
scene.
In spite of all Radford's attempts, this play reminds us that
Shakespeare had bigoted opinions and while Radford does not, the
play still has some of the original nastiness. I rate this
adaptation +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: OPTICAL ILLUSIONS: LUCENT AND THE CRASH OF TELECOM by Lisa
Endlich (copyright 2004, Simon and Schuster, 302pp, $26.95, ISBN
0-7432-2667-4) (book review by Joe Karpierz)
I'm fairly certain there are a lot of ex-AT&T/Lucent people that
read the MT VOID. I know our illustrious leaders, Evelyn and
Mark, are retirees of the place. There are others that are not so
lucky--those that over the last 4 or 5 years have been let go by
Lucent, as the company went from a high-flying telecommunications
equipment provider to a shell of its former self, a company that
once had over 125,000 employees, and now has something around
31,500. I was one of those people who was let go, back in
November of 2003--and I've only recently found work, after more
than a year on the unemployment rolls.
So when I found out that this book was being published, I was
curious. What would an outsider know about the situation at
Lucent? Many people asked me why I would care to read it; I
responded that I had this insane curiosity about the story she was
going to tell, and by the way, I actually did enjoy my time at
Lucent. I've always said that I did great projects with fun
people (hey, I know there are a few, but how many of you can say
they worked on the Caller ID project?), and I still have fond
memories of the place. So, while I was working my six-week stint
at Barnes and Noble, I picked up the book with the help of my 30%
employee discount.
I wasn't disappointed by what I read, but I wasn't bowled over,
either.
Those who work(ed) there will find little or nothing new in the
overall story, although some of the stuff that went on behind
closed doors surprised me when I thought that nothing in this
story could. There were a few things that were explained more
clearly which caused me to internally go "ah-HAH, so THAT'S why
that happened (in referring to the delayed spinoff of Agere and
the lawsuit involving Nina Aversano, neither of which I understood
fully at the time), but for the most part, the person on the
inside will find this an accurate account.
Those who are on the outside looking in will find a fascinating
tale of just how something that should have gone so well went so
wrong so fast. The details surrounding Lucent's demise are
staggering to me even now, and I lived them, as did others reading
this review. Readers not familiar with the telecommunications or
financial worlds will have no problems understanding what Endlich
is saying--she is very clear and direct.
I do find some fault with the book, however, both in its craft and
its presentation of certain individuals. As to the latter,
Endlich paints the "early" Rich McGinn in a good light, and I
don't remember *anyone* down in the trenches thinking that much of
him back in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Additionally, many (but
certainly not all) folks at my level thought highly of Henry
Schacht when he took control back from McGinn, while Endlich does
not paint a particularly rosy picture of him.
And here we come to the crux of my complaint with the craft of the
book. It seems like Endlich decided that there wasn't much story
to tell after McGinn was ousted as CEO. The book is divided into
chapters that cover one year each, except for the last one, which
covered 2002 and 2003. The chapters covering 2001 through 2003
seemed to be fluffy, with not as much investigation or in depth
information being presented. And while the final chapter spends a
goodly number of words on the Merrimack Valley manufacturing
plant, no coverage whatsoever is given to what happened in other
portions of the company, particularly in Illinois, where a
tremendous amount of money was wasted on two gorgeous but
unnecessary glass buildings (where up on the fifth floor there is
a lovely little greenhouse effect that makes you want to put on a
swimsuit and take a dip in a pool, or on the main level just off
the lobby the bathrooms are done entirely in marble to impress
customers), where the staffing levels dropped from some 12,000 or
13,000 across 8 buildings to roughly 5,000 that can't even fill 4
of those 8. No coverage was given to the outsourcing of work,
which led to major layoffs in Illinois and Columbus, Ohio.
Endlich focused on New Jersey but pretty much ignored the rest of
the company.
Fascinating? Yes. Worth a read? Yes. Sometimes disappointing?
Also yes.
Ah well, I rant. Read it--I think you'll like it. [-jak]
===================================================================
TOPIC: MONEYBALL: THE ART OF WINNING AN UNFAIR GAME by Michael
Lewis (Books on Tape, pub 2003, 8 CDs, 9h36m, ISBN 0-736-69865-5,
read by Scott Brick) (audio book review by Joe Karpierz)
My other passion in life, aside from science fiction, is baseball.
I was brought up on the game. I played it as a child, and I've
coached my children in either baseball or softball, and continue
to do so. During the summer I live and breathe the game, and
during the winter I can't wait for Spring Training (and can
generally tell you how long until Spring Training starts). I read
every bit of baseball information in the morning paper during the
season, and revel in the Hot Stove League, going on right now,
talking with other baseball enthusiasts about deals in the works
and how the upcoming season is shaping up. I love putting on my
glove and playing catch with my kids, and I love stepping into the
batting cages when I take my kids there.
I dare say I love baseball more than I love science fiction.
Most folks are peripherally aware that there is yet another
scandal rocking Major League Baseball right now--that of steroid
use in the game. But in my opinion, in reality, the problems in
today's brand of MLB stem from money. Lots of money. More money
than you and I can imagine, and as science fiction fans we can
imagine a lot. Player salaries are huge, and are getting larger
every year. In order to convince owners to pay those salaries,
many players resort to cheating, trying to get an advantage using
illegal substances.
It's all about money.
MONEYBALL is all about money too, or the lack of it. MONEYBALL is
generally about the Oakland Athletics and their General Manager
Billy Beane, and how he builds the A's into a powerhouse without
the large budgets of the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox, or
the Los Angeles Dodgers. Billy Beane must make do with a very
limited budget, so he sets out to change how a team is built, and
thus rocks the foundations of the game.
Beane believes that the old way of building teams, sending scouts
to scour the country, looking at ballplayers, getting gut feels,
and sitting around a table putting together a draft list is
antiquated and inefficient. Beane is new school. He relies on
statistics--and not the glamorous ones of home runs, runs batted
in, etc. Beane and his people are of a new breed, a breed of
people that didn't play the game but understand numbers and their
relationship to performance of both the team and the individual.
And he builds his team around players that no one else wants
because he sees things they don't, and he believes. And he
should--the A's have won more games in the regular season over the
last three or four years than any other team in baseball, with a
significantly smaller payroll than almost any other team in the
game.
This book certainly isn't for everyone. Most fans of the game
should find this look at Beane and what drives him extremely
fascinating. It is interesting to see how he deals with other GMs
around baseball, how he convinces them that they want to give up
certain players, how he swindles them, takes them for a ride.
However, non baseball fans may find it a fascinating study of how
to turn nothing into something, how to find holes in the existing
way of doing things and take advantage of new ideas.
And Beane's ideas are starting find acceptance in the game. The
Red Sox Theo Epstein, the youngest GM in the game, is said to be a
proponent of Beane's methods, although he has more money to work
with. And the Red Sox won their first World Series since 1918
this past season.
Again, it's not for everyone. But it's a great book.
Scott Brick does a decent and serviceable job of reading the
material. Nothing outstanding, but I found no faults, either.
There's not much more I can say about that. [-jak]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
"SARTOR RESARTUS is simply unreadable, and for me that always sort
of spoils a book." --Will Cuppy
I picked up P. C. Doherty's THE HORUS KILLINGS (ISBN 0-425-18293-
2) at a dollar store, and while it was certainly worth that price,
I didn't find it enthralling enough to recommend paying cover
price. This may be a problem I have with mysteries in general. I
generally see most of them as puzzles, and would not want to re-
read them. The ones I would recommend would be the more literary
ones that warrant multiple readings. (And I was pleased to read
someone's description of John Dickson Carr recently as an author
who wrote entirely for the puzzle aspect of how the murder was
done, with no style or characterization or even much motivation.
I thought I was the only one who thought that.) Anyway, this was
what I would call a good "beach read" (or would have, before this
week's events made beaches no longer the relaxing places they used
to be).
Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone's previous books have been about
books, book-selling, and book-collecting. OUT OF THE FLAMES: THE
REMARKABLE STORY OF A FEARLESS SCHOLAR, A FATAL HERESY, AND ONE OF
THE RAREST BOOKS IN THE WORLD (ISBN 0-767-90837-6) is a little
about a book, but more about an important forbear of the Unitarian
movement, Michael Servetus. The book was his "Christianismi
Restitutio" ("Christianity Restored"), all copies of which were
supposedly burned with him in 1553. However, three copies
survived, and they bear witness to the fact that he not only led
the way for a religious movement, but also understood the
circulation of blood in the human body decades before William
Harvey (who always gets credited with this discovery) wrote about
it. This is a fascinating history of religion, science, and the
interconnections between the two. My only complaint is the
really long title. :-)
Shifra Horn's SHALOM, JAPAN (ISBN 1-57566-223-X) is a collection
of essays about Japan by the wife of an Israeli diplomat who lived
there for five years. The double translation (Japanese words into
Hebrew and then into English) has resulted in some peculiar
spellings (e.g., "Om Shinari-Kiu" rather than the more
recognizable "Aum Shinrikyo"). Horn's comments are not always
flattering, and many have complained about her stereotyping of the
Japanese and her occasionally negative attitude. However, I found
this collection valuable as providing an alternative viewpoint to
the generally carefully diplomatic articles one usually sees, and
Horn's negativity seems directed at societal mores that end up
causing suicides or leaving the homeless to their fate rather than
everything different. You may disagree with her at times, but she
does give you food for thought. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Sapolsky's Third Law: Often, the biggest
impediment to scientific progress is not
what we don't know, but what we know.