THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
06/09/06 -- Vol. 24, No. 50, Whole Number 1338
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:
Hawai'i Logs
How To Be Smarter Than a Fish (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The Return of the Water Engine (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Leet (letter of comment by Paul S. R. Chisholm)
RATS by Robert Sullivan (book review by Mark R. Leeper)
THE SUN (SOLNTSE) (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
THANK YOU FOR SMOKING (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
50 WAYS OF SAYING FABULOUS (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (FREAKONOMICS: A ROGUE ECONOMIST
EXPLORES THE HIDDEN SIDE OF EVERYTHING, MOBY DICK,
and IN THE BEGINNING: TALES FROM THE PULP ERA)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Hawai'i Logs
Our Hawai'i trip logs are available at:
http://www.geocities.com/markleeper/hawaii.htm
http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper/hawaii.htm
===================================================================
TOPIC: How To Be Smarter Than a Fish (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Honest, I really saw this. I was in a used bookstore and I saw a
set of matched books that included the titles WALLEYE TACTICS,
TIPS & TALES, and ADVANCED WALLEYE STRATEGIES. They also had
MASTERING LARGEMOUTH BASS and ADVANCED BASS TECHNIQUES. These
were not little booklets either. These were full books. How
much study are people willing to do to outwit fish? Fish, for
cripes sakes. Hey, I saw JAWS. I believe that fish can be
fairly intelligent. But that was a movie. Come on, how can
anybody feel proud that they are smarter than a walleye? What a
triumph! [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: The Return of the Water Engine (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
A friend has said that she recently had seen a news item talking
about a water-powered car. She thought that she had seen the
item on CNN news. At first I had wondered if it was an April
Fools joke, but she had seen it in May, not on April 1. My
friend insisted that she had seen the story and she later pointed
me to a reference to it. It did indeed seem to claim that there
was a car with a water engine. Water-powered cars are part of
our folklore. One of the most popular urban legends is that
somebody once developed a car that would run on tap water. The
legend is that the big money interests--usually either the
automobile companies or the oil companies--heard about it and
realized that their days were numbered. (Why it would be a threat
to the automobile companies, I am not sure. For them it would be
just a new type of engine that would sell very well. But usually
they are blamed rather than the oil companies.) In any case, the
legend says that the evil capitalists bought up the rights to the
engine and/or terminated the inventor with extreme prejudice.
They liquidated him. To avoid the consequences of the discovery
it was hidden and hushed up, not unlike the Ark of the Covenant at
the end of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. There was a David Mamet play
about urban legends in general and this one in specific. The play
was called simply "The Water Engine."
I told my friend that a water engine is probably impossible.
There is just about nothing in the universe as chemically stable
as water. To get useful power out of water you would have to
reduce it to a more stable state. There is just about nothing
that you can make out of hydrogen and oxygen that is anywhere
nearly as stable as water is. Water that is the ambient
temperature has almost no more energy you can squeeze from it
chemically. The last remaining way to get energy from it is to
drop it. In fact, though we do not think of that way, much of our
households are water-powered. We just do not see the water. It
is way off somewhere falling on the blades of turbines. They
convert the kinetic energy into electricity and the electricity
carries the power to our homes. Of course, not all electricity
comes from waterpower. Some comes from burning coal; some comes
from nuclear fission. But it seemed to me if a car was to be
water-powered it would be in a roundabout way through turbines and
electricity.
Powering a car is perfectly possible using water through the
process of electrolysis. You may remember from your high school
chemistry a funny-looking device that a tank of water at the
bottom and two tubes sticking up at the top. (You can see one at
http://tinyurl.com/kgxax.)
You turned on the electricity to this thing and the water level
dropped a little over time. Then your teacher took a match and
held it near the stopcock at the top of one of the tubes, opened
the stopcock and there was a small explosion. (High school
chemistry teachers love those small explosions. They are very
dramatic for a class. Filmmakers know the same principle, though
they like bigger explosions. Big explosions in chemistry class
are frowned on by the school administration, or we probably would
have had more of them. But I digress.) In any case that
explosion comes from hydrogen which had to be bribed with a lot
of energy to separate from oxygen (the content of the other
tube). It sits in that tube, rich in energy but pining for
its lost oxygen. When it gets near a flame, which is just rapidly
oxidizing, it jumps a chance to combine again with oxygen and
release the energy it held. That it does and if humans get in
the way, Oh, the Humanity. But a car that runs on this energy is
not running on water, it is running on electricity. It is just
uses the water, or rather the hydrogen created from it, as a way
to store energy.
Well, I dug a little into the news story and I found they really
are calling this engine "water-powered," as I had to admit to my
friend. But that is a misnomer. Anyone expecting to run his or
her car exclusively on water is in for a rude surprise. It is
actually another electrical powered car and it will require a lot
of electricity, assuming it really works. According to what I read
the car runs on a controversial gas called Aquygen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquygen
Apparently you give it water and with a lot of electricity you
create--not hydrogen, as I suspected, but--something called by the
lackluster name of "Brown's Gas" that is also combustible. Water
is just the energy storage medium. It is like the old steam
locomotives were not really powered by water but by the burning of
wood, even though you did put a lot of water into them. Room-
temperature water is pretty darn stable. You can add energy to it
to perturb it from its H2O-at-room-temperature state and it will
try to go back, releasing that energy stored in it. Ways to
perturb it include heating it, separating it into hydrogen and
oxygen, putting it in a condom and taking it to a high window of a
hotel, or (apparently) turning it into Brown's gas.
If this all works--and I suppose it might--you would have a car
that is sort of powered by water. At least it is powered by a
process that requires water, as did the old steam locomotives.
That is not what a physicist would call powered by water. That
is still a thermodynamic impossibility. But you could look at it
that water is a requirement of the process that creates the
power.
Incidentally the claim has been made that a hydrogen-powered
engine is less polluting than a gasoline engine. Again this
falls to a maybe-it-is, maybe-it-isn't sort of area. Yes, the
engine itself is less polluting. But if burning coal generates
the electricity it uses, it is still not a very clean process.
Now I vote for the guy who runs his car on the old oil that
McDonalds has used to make French Fries. There is someone out
there with an engine that runs on used cooking oil. It not only
runs on a waste product, which is essentially free, but it smells
like cooking French Fries.
Info on the frymobile is at
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11809771/. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Leet (letter of comment by Paul S. R. Chisholm)
Paul S. R. Chisholm writes, “Congratulations on your "elite"
issue 1337: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet. [-psrc]
Mark replies, “The issue is also available in super-leet. A back
of the envelope computation tells me that it brings the whole
issue down to 47 characters. I would reproduce it here, but many
(most) of the characters are not available on standard keyboards.
It is so elite and exclusive that only about 6.5 people in the
whole world read it at all. The .5 is someone who understands it
only when he is off his meds. Probably none of them has ever
even heard of the MT VOID, but the issue is available in super-
leet if they ever do. At least I don't think any of them has
ever heard of the VOID. (If one of you should be reading this
let me just say #. I hope I spelled that right.)” [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: RATS: OBSERVATIONS ON THE HISTORY AND HABITAT OF THE CITY'S
MOST UNWANTED INHABITANTS by Robert Sullivan (ISBN 1-582-34477-9)
(book review by Mark R. Leeper)
I guess my interest in rats stemmed from seeing the film OF
UNKNOWN ORIGIN (1983). This film was promoted as a horror film,
but is a sort of a “Moby Dick” story set in Manhattan. A man
with a nice home, nice family, etc., finds there is a rat in his
home. He proceeds to try to get rid of it and finds himself in a
struggle that destroys his home, his life, and his humanity. He
gives up all he values to stop this one intelligent and vengeful
rat. The film is full of rat facts and rat lore. This film for
me transformed rats from being an unpleasant part of the scenery
into fascinating and even impressive animals. Among other things
they are scavengers who will chew through iron or solid concrete
to get to their food supply.
Robert Sullivan, a writer I have seen published in “The New
Yorker,” has written RATS: OBSERVATIONS ON THE HISTORY & HABITAT
OF THE CITY'S MOST UNWANTED INHABITANTS. Sullivan took a year to
just observe rats and also to research the history of rats in
Manhattan. He sometimes goes beyond the bounds of Manhattan, as
in telling a little about the Black Death in Europe, but for the
most part his subject is rats in Manhattan. His description of
his rat observation gear makes quite a picture of himself,
apparently, going out to back alleys and garbage dumps to
observe. Just why he spent so much time observing the rats is a
mystery because there is very little of his observations on rats
in the book. In fact, I learned more about rats from OF UNKNOWN
ORIGIN, unreliable as that was, than I did reading his book.
Sullivan describes going out to watch the rats, but he keeps
getting distracted by the people he meets around the rats or by
giving tangential stories like the history of a legendary rat
catcher. His subject matter is not so much rats, but the people
whose lives are affected by rats. And the author does not need
the night-vision gear he talks about to find out about humans.
Sullivan does report the rat behavior he sees but does not
interpret it at any depth. I spent most of my reading time
waiting for him to get to the rats.
The book is very much anecdotal. He has footnotes and copious
chapter notes in the back of the book. They are only a little
more concrete with more specific information about the books he
read and they contain more anecdotes. But this is a non-fiction
book without an index. That usually indicates to me that the
publisher wants the book to be considered breezy rather than
serious. Even the chapter titles are not very descriptive. Most
chapters have single-word titles. And the one word may be as
opaque as "Excellent." (That is the chapter on Bobby Corrigan,
champion rat catcher.) If somewhere among the light prose the
reader has gleaned a fact that he wants to go back to re-read, the
book offers minimal help in finding the material again. In spite
of all the footnotes, Sullivan's book seems to be little more than
a "beach read" passing for a scholarly work. The book is
entertaining, but not very serious. Sullivan's book should not be
placed in the same category with books such as THE HIDDEN LIFE OF
DOGS by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas that have serious and valuable
insights.
I did not learn very much about rats reading this book and I am
not sure that Sullivan learned much about rats in his year
studying them. I will look for a better book on the subject.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE SUN (SOLNTSE) (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: At the close of WWII Emperor Hirohito saw his country
attacked with nuclear weapons, had to surrender his country to
invaders, and had to renounce his divinity. THE SUN tells the
story of the man under these trials. It looks in depth at a man
whose society loaded heavy responsibility on and who was a puppet
with heavy self-doubts. The film is slow, claustrophobic, and
dark in many senses, but is highly provocative. THE SUN is
reminiscent of THE LAST EMPEROR, and is actually more
intelligent. Rating: high +2 (-4 to +4) or 8/10
Alexander Sokurov previously made MOLOCH dramatizing Adolf Hitler
and Lenin about Lenin. As his next film in this series, he
analyzes Emperor Hirohito of Japan. It is the closing days of
WWII and the American invaders have invaded Tokyo. Japan his
reeling under the effect of two nuclear attacks. We enter
Hirohito's mind as he weighs continuing fighting and later the
issue of whether to renounce his claim to divinity as a
descendent of the sun.
The Emperor himself is torn with doubt of his divine status and
looks for scientific evidence of this family's supernatural
station. He sees his body as being like other people's. He
studies science and writes poetry and fancies himself an artist
and scientist. But his science is a study of marine biology in
which he learns from specimens brought to his palace. His poetry
is kept private.
Much of the film takes place in the bunker beneath the palace.
The Emperor has a great fear that the same Americans who had used
such a terrible bomb would have no mercy on his people once they
invade. He also has do idea of the devastation his own city has
already faced since his palace had been spared the bombing.
The film moves with a very deliberate and slow pace, much like a
film by Andrei Tarkovsky. The difference is that there is a lot
of history to think about in these pauses. This film seems to
show the man as a prisoner of his status. It is claimed that he
knew little of that his generals were doing in his name and would
not have condoned a lot of what was happening. (This seems a
more traditional understanding of the man and more recent
histories seem to imply a much greater participation.)
By the time he emerges from the palace into the very dim light of
day, the Americans have already occupied his palace grounds. In
spite of his retainers' insistence that he be formal with them he
willingly poses for pictures and seems to like the Americans. A
major section of the film is his exchanges with a never-
identified-by-name Douglas MacArthur (played by Robert Dawson).
The film gives fascinating little insights into his mind,
including a fascinating scene in which he envisions an air raid
on his country. In the midst of his own country's racism toward
the Koreans and Chinese he detests Americans feeling superior to
his countrymen, apparently accepting the idea of a status ladder
but not liking being lower than the top. He feels his country
was allied with Hitler against racism. Hitler, he informs
MacArthur, is a man he had never met.
Issey Ogata plays the emperor as a quiet contemplative man. His
expressions with is mouth suggest that of a carp, a fish revered
in Japan for its tenacity. Above all he is a man who desperately
is searching for his responsibilities to do not what he wants but
what is right.
This is a deep but very rewarding film. I rate THE SUN a high +2
on the -4 to +4 scale or 8/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THANK YOU FOR SMOKING (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: THANK YOU FOR SMOKING is really better as an essay on
the gentle art of spin and of argument than it is as a story.
Written and directed by Jason Reitman, this is a comedy about Big
Tobacco's greatest public relations spin-doctor. And the
arguments are well enough put that the viewer may well find
himself siding with the nefarious Nick Naylor. The plot is
rudimentary, but the film is still an education. Rating: high +1
(-4 to +4) or 6/10
The phrase "Thank you for smoking" has a special meaning for me.
Years ago when communications workers went on strike I was
ordered to go to North Carolina to fill in for striking workers.
I did not know it until I got there, but I had been assigned to
work inside the offices and factory of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco
Company. As far as I was concerned that was inside "the belly of
the beast." I was strongly anti-tobacco. I worked with a
charming young executive, very much a gentleman, who over
breakfast one day confided in me that his wife worked at a birth
control center and that he hoped I would not find that too
immoral. I did not have the heart to tell him that to me being a
Northeast liberal it is tobacco and not birth control that seems
immoral. Just being in the R. J. Reynolds building is an
education in itself. That was where I first saw Joe Camel, years
before he was on billboards. But many executives around the
building had signs on their desks reading, "Thank you for
smoking."
In the film's world as well as in the real world the big tobacco
companies compete with each other, but they all agree on the
cause of protecting the tobacco industry. So they fund the
Tobacco Institute, in this film called the Academy of Tobacco
Studies. The institute and tobacco get a lot of bad publicity
and they have a public relations top gun, a superb spin-doctor in
the form of Nick Naylor (played by Aaron Eckhart).
Watching THANK YOU FOR SMOKING and seeing Naylor do his thing in
an odd way is like watching a Jackie Chan film. Neither film has
a very good story. That is not what you see either film for.
You see it to watch someone who is a consummate craftsman at
getting himself (and in this case the tobacco industry) out of
tight situations. Chan uses physical ability and Naylor uses
superb rhetorical skills. He can stand in front of a hostile
audience and with a few carefully chosen observations he can have
them eating out of his hand. And what is fascinating is that
even the anti-tobacco viewer is seduced by his logic. Even
though, as he admits when he is together with other lobbyists he
admits that the tobacco industry has a huge daily death toll, his
arguments in favor of the industry are still inviting. We are
just fascinated to see him use his ability.
The plot taken from Christopher Buckley's novel and adapted by
director Reitman is not the main attraction. It concerns in part
how in spite of the bad publicity he gets he still can win the
love and admiration of his formerly skeptical son. We see how
Naylor dispatches several threats to the tobacco industry. A
former Marlboro Man (Sam Elliot) is dying of cancer and wants to
initiate an anti-tobacco campaign. Katie Holmes plays an
insidious reporter who is trying to entrap Naylor himself. Then
there is a plot of a crusading congressman from Vermont, Senator
Ortolan K. Finistirre (William H. Macy) who is gunning for Naylor
and Big Tobacco. The film revels in nasty characterizations of
all concerned, not just Naylor. Naylor is adroit and dispatches
each of these threats with aplomb. And while doing all this he
redeems himself in the eyes of his son.
Naylor is a sort of amoral anti-hero for a new age. His
arguments are as cool and beguiling as those of Orson Welles in
THE THIRD MAN. How can he look at himself in a mirror at the end
of the day after contributing to the death and illness of
thousands? He uses what he calls "the yuppie Nuremberg defense":
Everybody's got a mortgage to pay. He gets his self-respect by
doing well at job, not by doing good.
This is not a highly polished film. The cinematography is
adequate, but little more. Besides having many familiar faces in
the cast there does not seem to be much budget behind the film.
But the film's attraction is in the writing and in its nuts and
bolts demonstration of the spin profession. I can think of few
better classes in how to deceive and mislead. I rate THANK YOU
FOR SMOKING a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Terry Zwigoff directs a satire of art school life that
runs outs of steam and switches over to a serial killer film.
This has the feel of a beginner's film and has some fun moments
and a good performance by John Malkovich, but overall does not
have enough to keep it going. Rating: 0 (-4 to +4) or 4/10
Spoiler Warning: A minor spoiler follows the review.
ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL is only partially what it claims to be.
It is really two different films tied together uneasily. One is
story about the disenchanting experiences of a young freshman in
art school. It is sort of an art school PAPER CHASE showing the
weirdness of art students and faculty and the frustrations that
an art student may expect on the difficult road to success. That
would have made an interesting film in itself, though that sort
of thing has done before with PAPER CHASE and TRUE GENIUS, to
name two such films. However, writer Daniel Clowes (based on his
own comic story) apparently realized that he did not have
sufficient material to make that film work so he threw in a
nearly unrelated plot of a serial killer on campus. Personally I
would say that serial killers have been done to death in films
and it seems an act of desperation to throw one in here to
artificially add interest and extend the story. Serial killers I
suspect have little to do with an average art student's
experience. The glue that Clowes uses to tie his two plots
together is an irony borrowed from Martin Scorsese. Two
different Scorsese films have pretty much use this same ironic
point and Clowes adopts it. I will give the specific films in
the Spoiler Section after the review.
Jerome Platz (played by Max Minghella) has been the victim of
bullies through his high school career. His one revenge is to
draw pictures of his revenge on the bullies. Art becomes more
than a hobby for him so when he gets a chance he enrolls in the
Strathmore Institute of Art. There he can be in with many other
misfits, many with their own outlandish way of getting attention.
Also a major attraction for him is the chance to see and draw
naked models. Much of the student body is made up of pretentious
jerks. The professors are mostly apathetic and self-absorbed
with little real interest in the students. His premier teacher
is Professor Sandiford (John Malkovich who looking a lot like
Pablo Picasso) and while his art looks to the viewer as showing
talent, the class seems to put his work down and instead idolize
that of class hero Jonah (Matt Keeslar). But more than talent is
needed since, as Sandiford says, only one percent of the class
will ever make a living at art. Strathmore Graduate Jimmy (Jim
Broadbent) had talent and still ended up a campus legend, a
burned out alcoholic hanging around campus, and an object lesson
to aspiring art students. Jerome does make friends with one
attractive model, Audrey Baumgarten (Sophia Myles), the daughter
of a famous artist. Oh, and there is also a serial killer who is
preying on people in the community.
I suspect that this film was really inspired by somebody's
experiences at an art school similar to Strathmore, but the
problems the script exposes are likely to be true in any academic
environment, and the complaints just seem to be grousing. The
name "confidential" seems to imply that something really shocking
will be revealed. There is little in this film anyone would want
to keep private. Terry Zwigoff previously directed CRUMB, GHOST
WORLD, and BAD SANTA. Personally I liked only GHOST WORLD of the
three, but all these films had some bite and anger to them. Here
the complaints are more like that Jerome's classmates did not
appreciate his art. He got an A, but everybody got an A. That
is a little weak. Max Minghella who plays Jerome Platz, is the
son of Anthony Minghella who directed THE ENGLISH PATIENT, THE
TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, and COLD MOUNTAIN. Max was previously the
musical son in BEE SEASON.
Terry Zwigoff really needed a better script to work from. This
film about an innocent learning the ropes seems to be written by
a scriptwriter who is also an innocent learning the ropes. I
rate ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale or 4/10.
Spoiler: The two films I refer to are TAXI DRIVER and THE KING
OF COMEDY, films that I think tell very much the same story in
two very different environments. It is not quite the same story
here but the Jerome finds much the same path to success. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: 50 WAYS OF SAYING FABULOUS (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: From New Zealand comes Stewart Main's comedy/drama of
three teenagers, two boys and a girl, all confused about what
gender roles they want to take. None of the characters are
believable. Rating: 0 (-4 to +4) or 4/10
One can generally tell if young teenage actors are speaking and
behaving like real teens or if they are just mouthing lines
written by adults. The acting in 50 WAYS OF SAYING FABULOUS is
simply not real and convincing enough to sell the story. The
fault may be with director and screenwriter Stewart Main's
script. In any case there is the feeling hovering over most of
this film that it was written by adults to preach.
Billy, age thirteen or so (played by Andrew Patterson), is
fascinated by a television hero played by a girl with a ponytail.
He does not have a crush on her; he wants to be her. He even
sticks a cow's tail under his hat to look like a ponytail. This
does not seem to be a huge problem for him, indicating that
people are a lot more tolerant in this New Zealand ranching
community than Americans would be. Billy's sister Lou (Harriet
Beattie), on the other hand, is a tomboy who is not just accepted
as one of the boys on the rugby team, she is actually better than
any of the boys, while never being as violent as the boys.
Billy becomes friends, sort of, with Roy (Jay Collins), a quiet
and sad-faced newcomer to the area. Roy is interested in Billy
romantically and Billy is tentative about starting a gay
relationship. The relationship is complicated when a new hired
hand comes to the ranch, Jamie, who is straight but a real hunk.
Billy is attracted to him and Jamie is either oblivious or
ignoring the situation.
Main tries to put messages into the film lessons like to not
believe in gender stereotypes. But his people seem to be taken
more from wishful thinking than from the real world. Some of the
music that goes with the film is sugary sweet and the science
fiction television show the kids all watch seems like a
patronizing stereotype of television science fiction.
There is one minor action scene in which someone falls in a way
that seems physical impossible and ends lying in a position that
seems equally impossible. If this were Main's first film I would
expect he would improve with time. However, I am surprised to
see he has been directing films since 1985 (according to the
IMDB). I rate 50 WAYS OF SAYING FABULOUS a 0 on the -4 to +4
scale or 4/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
FREAKONOMICS: A ROGUE ECONOMIST EXPLORES THE HIDDEN SIDE OF
EVERYTHING by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (ISBN 0-06-
073132-X) has been a cause celebre for a long time now, enough
that I had to wait this long to get the library's copy. Levitt
and Dubner do acknowledge that correlations can be misleading: if
A and B are correlated, does A cause B, or vice versa? [Note
that commonly you have both in a feedback loop. -mrl] But the
other possibilities that they often seem to overlook are that
both are caused by C, or that it is just a coincidence. Their
conclusions certainly sound reasonable, but I am still skeptical,
for example, that they have definitely pinned down the important
factors in parenting. After all, everyone who came before them
was sure they had the answers also. The chapter on teachers and
sumo wrestlers suggesting bias in testing methods does imply that
at least some of the accusations derived from the data were
admitted to by the perpetrators, but otherwise I suspect the last
has not been heard on these subjects. What is true is that if you
have been reading all the articles about FREAKONOMICS, you may not
get very much additional from the book itself unless you want to
try to analyze the data yourself.
MOBY DICK by Herman Melville (ISBN 0-812-54307-6) is a much
misunderstood book. People talk about how long it is--but at 470
pages (in the Norton Critical Edition) is shorter than a high
proportion of science fiction, fantasy, or thriller novels
written today. (Tom Clancy and Robert Jordan write novels
*twice* as long.) It has a reputation for seriousness, yet it is
full of wit and humor. For example, in chapter one, Ishmael
talks about how he goes to sea: "I always go to sea as a sailor,
because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas
they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of.
On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is
all the difference in the world between paying and being paid.
The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction
that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But *being
paid*,--what will compare with it? The urbane activity with
which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that
we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills,
and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how
cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!" (The two orchard
thieves are, of course, Adam and Eve.)
And later, in chapter 55, when he is describing how whales are
portrayed, he says, "As for the sign-painters' whales seen in the
streets hanging over the shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said
of them? They are generally Richard III whales, with dromedary
humps, ...."
Or, "For as in landscape gardening, a spire, cupola, monument, or
tower of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable to the
completion of the scene; so no face can be physiognomically in
keeping without the elevated open-work belfry of the nose."
But of course Melville has his serious moments, and much of what
he says remains as true today as it was in 1851: "[However] baby
man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a
flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for
ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and
murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can
make." It was true sixty years after Melville with Titanic, and
it was true a hundred and fifty years after he wrote as it was
with the fishing boat caught in the "perfect storm."
And in keeping with my noting of disparaging references to Jews
in older literature, let me note that in chapter 89 Melville
says, "What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker,
gets from poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep
Woebegone's family from starvation; what is that ruinous discount
but a Fast-Fish?" On the other hand, he does somewhat
counterbalance this by saying in chapter 92, "[Nor] can whalemen
be recognized, as the people of the middles ages affected to
detect a Jew in the company, by the nose."
Robert Silverberg is one of the great science fiction icons of
our time. But while he is known now for his erudition and
literary qualities, the sixteen stories in IN THE BEGINNING:
TALES FROM THE PULP ERA (ISBN 1-59606-043-3) are from his
earliest period, in the years during and shortly after when he
was a student, and are a small part of his prodigious output for
the pulps of the 1950s. Given that there were several times when
he had *four* stories in a single issue of a magazine (under
different pan names, of course), this can provide just a small
sample. However, the fact that none of these have been
previously reprinted means that this is a must-read for those
interested in the early career of one of the great science
fiction writers. Admittedly, at $40 for the signed, numbered
limited edition, it is pricier than most other hardcover books
but, content aside, the physical book is also much better
constructed, with lovely textured end papers, good typography,
and high-quality paper. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Man does not live by words alone,
despite the fact that he sometimes
has to eat them.
-- Adlai Stevenson