THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
09/09/05 -- Vol. 24, No. 11, Whole Number 1299
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:
Your Horoscope (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The LA Theatre Works (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Asterisks in the Name of Decency Are No Defense!
(letter of comment by Charles S. Harris)
Everything I Ever Needed To Know about Being in the
Time Patrol I Learned from Cheating at
Solitaire (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
TOUCH THE SOUND (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
KEANE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (Jorge Luis Borges)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Your Horoscope (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
(Due to economy concerns we cannot provide complete horoscopes.
Your cooperation is appreciated.)
Taurus: This would be a good time to review your investments.
Trust your friends. That is what makes them your friends.
Everyone else: Turn off your cell phone in theaters. Don't be a
putz. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: The LA Theatre Works (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
A while back I wrote several columns about drama to be found on
the Internet. I found a really good online drama site, though
this is not strictly speaking radio drama. When I was in Los
Angeles on family business going to bed one night I heard on the
radio the LA Theatre Works's production of Arthur Miller's THE
RIDE DOWN MT. MORGAN. It was Miller and the play starred Brian
Cox, who is an exceptionally good actor I have liked in other
things. I had paid to see this play on Broadway. As I was
listening they said the play would be available at their web site
for one week. That was all I needed to hear. It turns out every
week they have a two-hour (with trimmings before and after) play.
Most are major (as in Broadway or off-Broadway) plays and they
have actors like Annette Benning, Ed Begley Jr., and Ed Asner.
After seven days they give you only the first fifteen minutes of
the play and put the current play up in full. But it is probably
the best site for downloadable drama on the web:
http://www.scpr.org/programs/latw/index.html
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Everything I Ever Needed To Know about Being in the Time
Patrol I Learned from Cheating at Solitaire (comments by Mark
R. Leeper)
Poul Anderson wrote a series of stories about a group of time
policemen called the Time Patrol. They go back in time and
change history or protect history from being changed. I have had
a chance to actually experiment with going back in time and
seeing how well I can make things right. It comes from an
unexpected source.
I carry a palmtop computer in my pocket and use it probably every
waking hour in the day. Perhaps it is every half-hour. Most of
the applications are fairly practical, but I also have a few
games. One of these games is Klondike. This is and electronic
version of what is probably the best-known card solitaire game.
In fact, most people just call the game "solitaire." There are
seven stacks of cards, and four collection stacks, one for each
suit, etc.
The palmtop version of the game has a feature that just recently
I have taken more notice of. It has a backspace key with which
the user can back the game up one step. Using it is probably
"cheating" by the standard rules. But since the game makes a few
moves automatically that anyone in his right mind would make,
they probably wanted to still give the player a chance to back
those moves out. So the players are given the capability to back
up a step. In fact hitting the backspace key repeatedly backs the
game up as far as the user wants. He can go all the way back to
the beginning of the game.
It occurred to me, that this game could be used as a sort of
laboratory for examining the sort of assumptions made by science
fiction authors in time travel stories. Poul Andersen wrote his
stores about an organization of agents who go back in time and
try to influence events based on their knowledge of the future.
If we think of the game as a metaphor for a period of history one
has the capability to back up the clock, make a different
decision based on knowledge of what is to come, and see how the
game plays out. If we do not like that one we can go further back
and change it again.
I won't say I have discovered anything very astounding about time
patrolling, playing this game. Mostly I just have confirmations
of things that most science fiction writers have assumed. What
have I learned follows.
-- Going back and changing the past does significantly improve
your chances of a positive result. This is particularly true if
you allow yourself any number of trips back in time. Is what is
important the tide of history or individual decisions? Both are.
If the cards are bad there may be nothing you can do. But
individual decisions make important differences.
-- Frequently one wants to go back short jumps just to decide on
a trivial case. You might want to change a few big things, but
you change as many small things. You ask yourself do I get what
looks like a better result if I do A or B?
-- What looks like a better result often is not. There can be
eight good results from action A and one mediocre result from B,
but frequently that one mediocre result may later turn out to be
the crucial one.
-- Chance plays a very big part in results. There is some chance
and some things you can control. And you have to figure out
which is which. I think there is a famous prayer to that effect.
-- Captain Kirk notwithstanding, there really are lost causes and
no-win situations. A "never say die" attitude will get you a
long way, but the belief that it will always save you is a
fantasy.
-- Ironically, frequently knowing the future and what to avoid
will cause you to make things worse. Usually this is because you
bring about a different fate from the one you were expecting.
Sometimes it makes things worse because you bring about just the
fate you were trying to avoid but in an even worse form.
-- The best course of action will many times seem illogical to
others. Sometimes even knowing the future, the best course of
action will seem insane even to you. The world is more complex
than you realize. The least promising path can be the best in
the long run.
-- Sometimes what appear to be the best opportunities to achieve
your goal actually get in your way.
I suppose none of this is really surprising, but it is always
interesting to see examples of it and to see that it is true.
Now I am ready for the Time Patrol. Where do I sign up? [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Asterisks in the Name of Decency Are No Defense! (letter of
comment by Charles S. Harris):
In response to Mark's article in the 08/19/05 issue of the MT VOID,
Charles S. Harris says, "Amazon.com lists and pictures this book
with its *full* title. On a related note, Amazon.com lists my
erstwhile scientific collaborator Naomi Weisstein's CD ["Papa,
Don't Lay That . . ."] with its full title . . . but the
accompanying photo of its cover is the version with 4 asterisks!
B&N features the uncensored (though barely visible) cover. Music
Outfitter has a photo of the unexpurgated cover, but the
crucial word is *hyphenated* in their text . . . and totally
*vowelless* in their URL! . . . Interestingly, Amazon.com takes
the opposite stance on Oliver James' (reprehensible) book, 'They
F You Up': unexpurgated cover photo, 3 asterisks in the listing
(whereas Amazon.co.uk has asterisks in both)." [-csh]
[We have dropped the URLs because they may cause either nanny
filters or spam filters to decide this is filterable. You can
search on the titles yourself. -ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: TOUCH THE SOUND (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
[This review originally ran in the 11/05/04 issue of the MT VOID,
but is being re-run since the film is opening this week.]
CAPSULE: This is a documentary about a deaf woman who uses the
feel of vibration to "hear" the music and has become an
accomplished musician. The film is a paean to the variety of
sound in our world, sound that we experience very differently from
how Evelyn Glennie does. Rating: low +1 (-4 to +4) or 5/10
Solo percussionist Evelyn Glennie is profoundly deaf and has been
since she was age eight. At least she is deaf in the usual sense.
She still has a sense of touch and can feel vibration. In fact
she feels vibration so sensitively that she effectively hears
through touch. She is adept enough can carry on conversation and
is even a talented musician. She has been honored with an
appointment to the Order of the British Empire. This is a
documentary about Evelyn Glennie and her world of exploring sound.
Glennie considers sound a form of touching and has made her whole
life about touching and feeling sound. This film tries to create
her world and is a lush appreciation of sound. We follow her as
she goes around her new studio, on old warehouse, and finds things
she can turn into musical instruments. We travel with her
recording and observing sound. Just about anything that she finds
to bang together she can make music with and she does seem to be
able to get a pleasing sound.
This film is in large part concert she performs with Fred Frith.
The style of her music is sort of New Age, sense of wonder sort of
music. Director Thomas Riedelsheimer creates a feel of wonder for
variety of sound we have around us. This documentary about a deaf
woman is really a paean to sound. I suppose I can see what the
film was trying to do, but somehow the film's reverence for sound
in all forms just did not hit the right note. The film is well
made but for a narrow audience. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: KEANE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
[This review originally ran in the 01/21/05 issue of the MT VOID,
but is being re-run since the film is opening this week.]
CAPSULE: A manic-depressive searches for his kidnapped daughter
in and around New York's Port Authority. The film is much more
realistic than entertaining. Rating: 0 (-4 to +4) or 4/10
The subject is mental illness in this film written and directed by
Lodge Kerrigan. The film is set mostly in and around New York
City's Port Authority building. William Keane (played by Damian
Lewis of BAND OF BROTHERS) may or may not have been normal a few
months ago when he lost his daughter, but he certainly is not now.
His daughter was kidnapped several months earlier from the Port
Authority building. Now he is fixated on finding her again. He
searches the area over and over accosting strangers and asking if
they have seen his daughter. In very long takes we see him
stopping strangers, talking to himself, walking in traffic and in
tunnels, and playing detective in his mind looking for his lost
seven-year-old daughter. He seems to have become a familiar
hazard to navigation in the area.
When he is not searching he is making a pest of himself haunting
bars causing trouble. In one scene he goes to a prostitute and in
just a matter of a few minutes himself persona non grata with her.
He is the prisoner of his mania. Finally he starts to break out
of this routine when he meets a young woman from the same cheap
hotel where he stays. She has a daughter just about the age of
the daughter he has lost. The anguish he feels for his daughter
becomes a mania to help them.
Through much of the film not much happens and plot complications
are slow in coming. Instead we are given long takes showing Keane
behaving as a schizophrenic. His voice-overs put us in the mind
of a manic-depressive and show us how he would be thinking. This
is someone we have seen and most of us never look inside. But the
film shows us his thought patterns in ways we have not seen
before. The portrait is strong and very downbeat. It is a story
rather than just a portrait of the illness, but it is too slow to
be much of a story. I rate it a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale or 4/10.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Last month our science fiction discussion group read Jorge Luis
Borges's LABYRINTHS: SELECTED STORIES AND OTHER WRITINGS (ISBN
0-811-20012-4). As I described it to the group, "The fiction in
this is included in COLLECTED FICTIONS (ISBN 0-140-28680-2), a
1998 collection of all Borges's fiction. Several of the stories
come from an earlier collection, FICCIONES (ISBN 0-802-13030-5).
Many (all?) of the essays and parables are in SELECTED NON-
FICTIONS (ISBN 0-140-29011-7). All this is almost as convoluted
as one of Borges's stories!"
But it gets better. LABYRINTHS, FICCIONES, and COLLECTED
FICTIONS all have different translators for the corresponding
stories. For copyright reasons, the translations used in
FICCIONES in 1962 could not be used for LABYRINTHS two years
later. And COLLECTED FICTIONS is an attempt by Borges's estate
(i.e., widow) to produce a consistent new packaging of all his
work. So (for example), "Death and the Compass" is translated by
Norman Thomas di Giovanni in THE ALEPH AND OTHER STORIES (ISBN
0-142-43788-3), Andrew Kerrigan in FICCIONES, Donald A. Yates in
LABYRINTHS, and Andrew Hurley in COLLECTED FICTIONS.
(Oh, and THE ALEPH AND OTHER STORIES is not the same collection
of stories as the Spanish collection of Borges's work titled EL
ALEPH.)
And just so you can see how translations can vary, here is the
first line from "Death and the Compass", first in the original
Spanish, and then in each translation:
Original Spanish: "De los muchoes problemas que ejercitaron la
temeraria perspicacia de Lonnrot, ninguno tan extrano--tan
rigurosamente extrano, diremos--como la periodica serie de hechos
de sangre que culminaron en la quinta de Triste-le-Roy, entre el
interminable olor de los eucaliptos."
Norman Thomas di Giovanni: "Of the many problems ever to tax Erik
Lonnot's rash mind, none was so strange--so methodically strange,
let us say--as the intermittent series of murders which came to a
culmination amid the incessant odor of eucalyptus trees at the
villa Triste-Le-Roy."
Andrew Kerrigan: "Of the many problems which exercised the daring
perspicacity of Lonnrot none was so strange--so harshly strange,
we may say--as the staggered series of bloody acts which
culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the boundless odor
of the eucalypti.
Donald A. Yates: "Of the many problems which exercised the
reckless discernment of Lonnrot, none was so strange--so
rigorously strange, shall we say--as the periodic series of
bloody events which culminated at the villa of Triste-Le-Roy,
amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti."
Andrew Hurley: "Of the many problems on which Lonnrot's reckless
perspicacity was exercised, none was so strange--so rigorously
strange, one might say--as the periodic series of bloody deeds
that culminated at the Villa Triste-Le-Roy, amid the perpetual
fragrance of the eucalyptus."
(For what it's worth, I do think that Hurley's is the best, at
least for this sentence.)
And if you think this column is long so far, remember I have not
even gotten to the stories. Luckily for you I am going to limit
my comments primarily to "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"), because
"Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" itself, though only twenty pages
long, easily generates an entire column of comments on its own.
It is so full of minutiae and detail--almost every sentence is
worth noting or commenting on.
Uqbar is a fictional country, Tlon a fictional planet, and Orbis
Tertius . . . well, it is not clear what Orbis Tertius is.
Uqbar is almost a practice run here, with Borges describing an
article about it which appeared only in a some copies of pirated
edition of the 1902 "Encyclopaedia Britannica" called the "Anglo-
American Cyclopaedia". Uqbar is terrestrial, even if one is
unable to determine its exact location.
Tlon is much more developed, with a mysterious "First
Encyclopedia of Tlon" as the source of information. "Orbis
Tertius" is stamped on a couple of pages of the one volume Borges
has seen. Whether it is a location, a publisher, a bookseller,
or something else is never explained, not why the title puts
Urqar in the middle, when it has nothing to do with either of the
other two.
Borges's description of the encyclopedia volume having 1001 pages
evokes the 1001 nights of Arabian legend. And when he says that
he had a description of "an unknown planet [Tlon] with its
architecture and its playing cards, its mythological terrors and
the sound of its dialects, its emperors and its oceans, . . .,
its algebra and its fire," this reminds one of the Chinese
categorization system in Borges's "The Analytical Language of
John Wilkins" (found in OTHER INQUISITIONS).
Part of what makes this story evoke others is that it is a story
about world-building and shared worlds. Borges says it would
take many people who were experts in their fields and also
willing to "[submit] that inventiveness to a strict, systematic
plan." Ask any organizer of a shared-world anthology (for a new
world, not a pre-existing one) how easy that is!
Tlon has a language that is entirely verbs and adverbs (no nouns)
(e.g., "upward beyond the constant flow there was moondling"),
and another that is only adjectives (e.g., "airy-clear over dark-
round"). One wonders if the author of the "Star Trek: The Next
Generation" episode "Darmok" had read this. In that episode,
there is a race that speaks entirely in analogies, similes, and
metaphors. Borges is somewhat more convincing--he does not have
the Tlonians developing a high technology with their languages.
Almost every sentence makes one want to stop and think. He talks
about the Tlonians' notion of what is an object: "There are
objects made up of two sense elements, one visual, and the other
auditory--the color of a sunrise and the distant call of a bird."
Or "The metaphysicians of Tlon are not looking for truth, or even
an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement." One
reads those and gets a frisson, a real sense of wonder.
The poems "made up of one enormous word." Some might say this
reminds them of German, but I though of the sentences in Ted
Chiang's "Story of Your Life", which are written as a single
whole entity rather than a sequence of component words.
If you want a philosophy of time, Borges gives you a half dozen
such philosophies on a single page. Each of those could be
elaborated into an entire culture. (There's an idea--an
anthology of stories all inspired by Borges. I freely give this
idea to any editor who wants it, because I would love to read
such an anthology!)
(We have now reached just the halfway point of the story!)
The arithmetical system of Tlon "states that the operation of
counting modifies quantities and changes them from indefinites
into definites." The former reminds one of the common conception
(or perhaps misconception is more accurate) of Heisenberg's
Uncertainty Principle: that observation modifies the objects
observed. (Though this is not what Heisenberg said, it is indeed
quite often true, particularly with sentient objects.) The
latter sound like an expression of the Schroedinger's Cat
experiment, where the wave form does not collapse until an
observer peeks into the box. It is actually a better example in
some ways, since one objection to Schroedinger's Cat is that the
cat is already an observer. So the non-sentience of numbers
weakens the first part of the description and strengthens the
latter.
"Thus was discovered the unfitness of witnesses who were aware of
the experimental nature of the search...." Well, anyone who has
studied clinical trials that use single- and double-blind
experiments knows that this is true.
Borges's description of the various stages of "hronir" ("copies"
of a sort) starts with the notion that copies get less and less
accurate, but then assumes other changes, to the extent that
"[hronirs] of the eleventh degree have a purity of form which the
originals do not possess," making them perhaps a version of
Platonic forms.
Encyclopedias have often had revisions in subsequent editions.
However, Borges's description of the revisions in "First
Encyclopedia of Tlon" being "in keeping with the plan of
projecting a world which would not be too incompatible with the
real world" calls to my mind the idea that when a science fiction
author makes mistakes in science in a book or story, and it is
pointed out, he usually wants to fix this. (For example, the
first edition--but not later ones--of Larry Niven's RINGWORLD has
the Earth rotating in the wrong direction!)
And finally, Borges postulates, "Contact with Tlon and the ways
of Tlon have disintegrated this world. . . . Now the conjectural
'primitive language' of Tlon has found its way into the schools.
Now, the teaching of its harmonious history, full of stirring
episodes, has obliterated the history which dominated my
childhood." This brings up two parallels to me. First, that of
becoming so immersed in a fictional world that it starts to seem
real. Whether the Society of Creative Anachronism qualifies here
is not clear, but two more inarguable examples would be the
Sherlockian who maintain that Holmes and Watson were real and
that Doyle was merely Watson's literary agent, and the
Trekkies/Trekkers who spend time learning Klingon and translating
Shakespeare into it. (And then claiming that that is the
original!) And the other parallel would be to the idea that what
is taught in the schools as history changes over time. People
talk about this in regard to political correctness these days,
but it is much older than that. Some of it is "the victors write
the history books" and some is an attempt to change the society
itself. Borges's references to Communism and Fascism make clear,
I think, just what sort of revisionism he is talking about here.
This wealth of allusions and ideas is all the more astonishing
when one realizes that "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" was Borges's
second work of fiction, published in May 1940 (with a postscript
added in 1947). (His first was "Pierre Menard, Author of Don
Quixote", published a year earlier.)
"Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" is shorter and has less
density of ideas, though as biographer James Woodall noted, in it
Borges "carries out a razor-sharp act of literary deconstruction
long before any 1960s toiling campus critic promoted the cause
for actual academic use."
These were followed in 1941 by "The Circular Ruins", "The Library
of Babel" (arguably Borges's most famous story) and "The
Babylonian Lottery". The latter is clearly commenting on the
arbitrariness and irrationality of the political systems that
Borge was seeing at the time (especially given its reference to
Kakfa ["its sacred privy called Qaphqa"]). But when I read it
now, the image it brings to my mind is that of the transition
scene in the film DARK CITY, where the poor become rich, and the
rich lose their status. Could this be a reference to Borges?
One more comment: The most common recurring reference in Borges's
work is to mirrors. They are mentioned in "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius", "The Library of Babel", "Funes the Memorious", "Death
and the Compass", "The Theologians", "Story of the Warrior and the
Captive", "Emma Zunz", "Averroes' Search", and "A New Refutation
of Time". (And I may not have caught them all.)
The most notable and important stories in LABYRINTHS are "Tlon,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "The Garden of Forking Paths" (a spy
story), "The Lottery in Babylon" (a Kafka-esque society), "The
Library of Babel" (an infinite library), and "Death and the
Compass" (a detective story). While these form the core reading
of Borges's fiction, the other eighteen stories, ten essays, and
eight parables are well worth reading as well. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
You don't have to suffer to be a poet;
adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
-- John Ciardi