THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
10/13/06 -- Vol. 25, No. 15, Whole Number 1356
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:
Readercon 17 Convention Report Available
Juxtaposition (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Surviving on Wings of Song (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
THE DEPARTED (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
Fears (letter of comment by Fred Lerner)
This Week's Reading ("to-read" lists, SLIPSTREAMS,
GRANTVILLE GAZETTE II, and THE SITTAFORD MYSTERY)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Readercon 17 Convention Report Available
My Readercon 17 con report is available at:
http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper/reader17.htm
I realize that there are sometimes bandwidth problems with that
site. I have sent a copy to fanac.org and when it is posted there,
I *believe* the URL will be:
http://fanac.org/Other_Cons/ReaderCon/r17-rpt.html
Anyone who wants an email copy from me need only ask.
My Worldcon report is proceeding slowly. (I have written up two
panels, and have only twenty-two more to go. :-( ) My
observation between the two conventions, however, is that I took
as many pages of notes for the 48-hour Readercon as for the
96-hour Worldcon. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Juxtaposition (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I don't know if it was intended humorously but in the October 7,
2006, issue of SCIENCE NEWS on the New Books page they list
back-to-back Lee Smolin's THE TROUBLE WITH PHYSICS: THE RISE OF
STRING THEORY, THE FALL OF A SCIENCE, AND WHAT COMES NEXT and
Peter Woit's NOT EVEN WRONG: THE FAILURE OF STRING THEORY AND THE
SEARCH FOR UNITY IN PHYSICAL LAW. That thread did not last long,
did it? The two books are not even from the same publisher. If
this whets your appetite there was an article about the two books
in the New Yorker of October 2, 2006, on-line at
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/. Or read the New York
Times's take from September 17 at http://tinyurl.com/jzb4b.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Surviving on Wings of Song (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I bring you a story of courage and the will to live one's life on
ones own terms. This story comes from Hawaii. It seems on Kauai
if a guy has the courage to sing in the old-fashioned way, he can
be very popular. He will not be just popular, he will be a hero
to both genders. But his celebrity has a price; he may not live
very long. Oh, did I mention I am talking about crickets? I
guess I found some powerfil drama in this story from "Science
News" and "Science & Technology Daily". (The latter at
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/060923105230.htm.)
Five years ago just about all male crickets on Kauai sang at
night. It could get very noisy. It seems male crickets sing
using special scraping attachments on their wings. The female
hears this sound and to her it sounds great. What a male that
must be! She homes in on the male. Then they make beautiful
music together and that is where little crickets come from.
Well, at least that was the way it used to be. Five years ago the
Ormia Ochracea fly invaded Kauai from the North American
mainland. They also like the singing of crickets, but for
different reasons. The females follow the song and place their
larvae on a male on the backs of singing male crickets. The
larvae use the crickets for food. It was not a pretty sight and
it is not really very good for the crickets who were just not
planning to entertain. At least they did not plan to entertain fly larvae.
So far it is just a sad story of how the singing crickets attract
the wrong attention. But now mutation and evolution and fate
have taken a hand. Evolution has naturally brought about a
silent cricket. These crickets do not attract the flies.
Survival of the fittest had brought about a solution to the
problem. But, as the more alert of you may have realized, it is
not quite the ideal solution the crickets might want. It seems
that the while the silent crickets do not attract the killer
flies, they also do not attract females. This is not the ideal
solution to their problem.
So what is the solution? When the males hear a male cricket who
can still sing, they also are attracted to him. They bunch up
around him. The females who come for the singing cricket and
find him otherwise engaged frequently will pick instead one of his
non-singing followers. Now it might occur to the singing cricket
that he had a good thing going for a while. His song would be
the only one attracting the ladies. He would make out like a
bandit... a singing bandit, I guess. But now he has all these
other males as competition. They cannot sing a buzz. But
presumably as the only bona fide singing cricket he has his pick
of the ladies. And here they are using his call. In addition with
those killer flies still on the loose, and with so few singers,
this singing is suicidal. But at least it wins the brave little
cricket a lot of friends and perhaps some hangers-on. I guess for
a short time he is the cricket equivalent of a rock star. But
like many rock stars he lives fast and dies young.
The results on the Island of Kauai are reportedly startling.
Where the air used to be full of their noise, that time has
passed. Now the nights are silent. People can sleep better.
But when you do hear a cricket, you have to know that that is one
little indomitable cricket helping his fellow crickets. He is
holding a singing party and he probably is attracting a big
crowd.
Of course, if the last of the singers die out from all the
attention from the killer flies, the rest of the male crickets
will not be able to attract females. My advice to them is to
live fast, get their genes into the gene pool, die young, and
leave a fly-eaten corpse. After all, it is just those few doomed
singers keeping the whole race alive. When they are all gone we
shall not see or hear their like again, at least not on Kauai. I
guess the singing crickets are just martyrs to the survival of
the race. It just gives you respect for the whole gryllida race.
And so I salute you, you last remaining singing crickets of
Kauai. Your courage to sing, to continue the life force, to live
your little cricket lives by your own rules, in spite of all
dangers is an inspiration to us all. Jiminy Cricket, you are
brave. Hail to thee! You are a better man than I am, you singing
Teleogryllus Oceanicus. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE DEPARTED (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Martin Scorsese surprises us with a film that is more of
a thriller than his previous efforts. THE DEPARTED is a close
remake of a very good Hong Kong crime film. The police Special
Investigations Unit, unable to bring down gangster Frank
Costello, places a mole into his organization. But Costello
(Jack Nicholson) has his own mole in the police SIU. Each mole
tries to determine who the other is. Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt
Damon play the two spies. The film takes a while to get going,
but when it does it really holds the viewer. Much of the credit
goes to the original film. Rating: high +2 (-4 to +4) or 8/10
[Note that this Frank Costello is apparently not *the* Frank
Costello, the model for THE GODFATHER's Vito Corleone. Costello
died of a heart attack in 1972, while this film is full of cell
phones and contemporary cars.]
Martin Scorsese's earliest films were crime films with just a
little action. They were about character and the situations his
subjects got into because they were the way there were. If he
had action it was in small doses at the end, as he did with TAXI
DRIVER. Later, his bigger crime films like GOODFELLAS and CASINO
were more lavish, but they made sparing use of real action. He
tried to keep the films historically credible and used action
very sparsely. His films were thrilling, but it was more
intellectual excitement and less visceral. Also his films were
originals. He never remade a film, though his did base THE AGE
OF INNOCENCE on a novel that had been previously adapted. With
THE GANGS OF NEW YORK, he turned toward having a little more
action. With THE DEPARTED, he has departed very from his earlier
style. He is adapting a Hong Kong action film, Wai Keung Lau and
Siu Fai Mak's INFERNAL AFFAIRS. That film is an action film with
a lot of blood and that rubbed off on Scorsese's remake.
Scorsese holds off on the action until the last hour. THE
DEPARTED is a long film, just shy of 150 minutes, and there is
little other than establishing the situation that happens in the
second and third half-hour. But that last hour explodes with
just enough Hong-Kong-tyle action.
Billy Costigan (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and Colin Sullivan
(Matt Damon) are two rookie cops in the Boston police force in
the same year. The big difference is that Sullivan has more of a
taste for the finer things in life and has friends in low places.
Chief among these friends is Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson),
crime lord of Boston. Sullivan is a promising new policeman on
the executive path, but at the same time he is the eyes and ears
for Frank Costello in the Massachusetts State Police. Costigan
is apparently dismissed from the police academy and only two
people know that he is actually still an agent for the State
Police working his way into Costello's organization. For
Sullivan, police work is a comfortable life with high rewards
coming from both sides of the law. Costigan's life is grimy and
violent as he fights to win the trust of the vile Frank Costello.
He is full of self-doubts, particularly about how far to go to
win Costello's confidence. Sullivan is far more comfortable with
his double life.
Each side knows that there are moles in their respective
organizations. The police organize a program to find trap their
mole while Costello gets more frustrated and crazier with the
traitor becoming an obsession with him--an itch he cannot
scratch. Costello is always vulgar and violent, but with the
pressure of finding his enemy he seems to be descending further
into psychosis. As the cop fades into the crook and the crook
fades into the cop the story works out as a game of double agent
versus double agent as Sullivan and Costigan each tries to ferret
out the other's identity. It almost sounds like a good spy
thriller, and perhaps that is what it really is.
This is perhaps one of Matt Damon's best roles. I am not sure he
is believable in the "Bourne" films, being just a little too
smooth and callow, but here he is a few years older and better
fit for the part. DiCaprio stretches himself with each role and
in spite his stint as a teenage heartthrob has been a good actor
all along. Here his role is quite reminiscent of his part in
Scorsese's THE GANGS OF NEW YORK, but he handles it well. Had
the roles been reversed DiCaprio could have been as good as
Sullivan and Damon could probably not have been believable as
Costigan.
Like John Wayne, Jack Nicholson gets a lot of credit for playing
very well one type of character with only modest variations. He
does not stretch himself very much, and nobody seems to demand
anything fresh of him. In spite of the public perception, I find
it hard to think of him as being a very talented actor. Here he
has some of interest in his character, but not all of it works.
Scorsese shows him attending the opera, admittedly flanked by two
attractive women. This minor touch of refinement fits with
nothing else in his role and I am not sure why Scorsese has it in
the film.
For comparison purposes I re-watched INFERNAL AFFAIRS the day
after seeing THE DEPARTED. The plot is very close, and
individual scenes and even some camera angles have been retained
for the Scorsese version. THE DEPARTED was a little easier to
follow than INFERNAL AFFAIRS was on first viewing. Jack
Nicholson gives what may be a better performance than his
counterpart, but it is difficult to tell because of the language
and cultural differences. With 48 extra minutes Scorsese delves
a little deeper into the background and motivation of his
characters, but he pays a heavy price in pacing. Scorsese has
more graphic violence and--if I am to believe the subtitles of
THE DAPARTED--more (very) strong language. My wife pointed out
how much better the two key action scenes were handled in the
Hong Kong film. Scorsese conflates the two female leads into a
single character and adds a male character. Those changes make
for two interesting though contrived-seeming ironies. Because
INFERNAL AFFAIRS originated the plot and because it has better
pacing, I would say that Scorsese added surprisingly little value
to the story in his remake. I would have expected more. While
this is one of Scorsese's most entertaining films, I have to say
much of the credit goes to INFERNAL AFFAIRS. THE DEPARTED is the
bigger film in many respects, but INFERNAL AFFAIRS is the better
film. Scorsese added only modest value in return for taking
someone else's plot. I give the resulting film a high +2 on the
-4 to +4 scale or 8/10, but he very much shares the credit. If
it is not obvious I recommend INFERNAL AFFAIRS, particularly for
people who liked THE DEPARTED. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Fears (letter of comment by Fred Lerner)
In Mark's response to John Purcell's letter of comment in the
10/06/06 issue of the MT VOID, Mark wrote: "I wonder if
agoraphobia can actually be genetic. I think certain phobias
are. Fear of snakes, spiders, and heights, for example, seem to
go beyond what one would expect from cultural training. Newborns
seem to fear heights almost instantly. Fear of snakes and
spiders, however, is not universal. I have no instinctive fear
of snakes but do have one, albeit easily overcome, of spiders.
But I can see how there is a survival value to fear of spiders,
snakes, and heights. [-mrl]
Fred Lerner responds: "Just this morning I indexed an article
that explores precisely this issue. Rather than copy its very
long title (and even longer abstract) I'll direct you to
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pnpbp.2006.01.008 where you can see
them." [-fl]
[The article is titled "Human brain evolution and the
'Neuroevolutionary Time-depth Principle:' Implications for the
Reclassification of fear-circuitry-related traits in DSM-V and
for studying resilience to warzone-related posttraumatic stress
disorder".]
So Mark adds, "Oh, is that what that article is about? (How
could you tell?)" [-mrl]
====================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Just a note: when I retired in July 2001, my "to-read" list had
145 books on it, and I estimated it would take fourteen months to
read them. However, since I kept buying books, and checking them
out from the library, and borrowing them, and having "assigned
reading" or two book discussion groups *and* the Sidewise jury,
at times it seemed like the "marching Chinese." However, I have
been diligent and now, five years and three months later, my
"to-read" list is down to 70 books, which I estimate to be
four-months' worth (because I have more time to read).
SLIPSTREAMS edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers (ISBN
0-7564-0357-X) is a collection of original "slipstream" stories.
However, since "slipstream" is such a vague term, this is really
just a general original anthology, with the one limitation that
you probably would not find a story that was strictly within a
sub-genre (e.g., military science fiction) in it. For example,
"Biding Time" by Robert J. Sawyer is a straight-forward mystery
set on Mars, "Venting" by Alan Dean Foster and "From Gehenna" by
Isaac Szpindel are fantasies, and so on. There are some that I
would call meta-fiction, which may be a subset of slipstream
(e.g., "Critical Analysis" by Tanya Huff and "Psycho Physics" by
Donald J. Bingle). It's a mixed bag, but has the advantage of
giving the reader a variety of stories, rather than the
repetition one finds in a theme anthology.
GRANTVILLE GAZETTE II edited by Eric Flint (ISBN 1-416-52051-1)
does not have this advantage--it consist entirely of stories set
in (and non-fiction about) Eric Flint's "1632" universe. (This
began with the novel 1632 in which a chunk of current-day West
Virginia is suddenly transported to Europe in the midst of the
Thirty Years' War, and has been continued in several books and
stories.) The stories all assume a familiarity with the earlier
works, and the whole thing seems to have become very
self-contained, with special electronic bulletin boards
established by Baen Books, including one that Flint requires all
story submissions be posted to before he will even consider them
for publication. In addition, the proofreading is execrable,
with such errors as 'a next thing' instead of 'a near thing', and
several spots where two words are run together.
I wrote in the 09/22/06 issue of the MT VOID about how Miss
Marple had been shoe-horned into the "Masterpiece Theater"
production of Agatha Christie's BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS.
For that, though, they at least kept the basic story. For
Christie's THE SITTAFORD MYSTERY (American title, MURDER AT
HAZELMOOR) (ISBN 0-312-97981-9), they not only added Miss Marple,
but also changed three of the "Five W's" (who, what, when, where,
and why). (I will not say which ones, so as not to give too many
spoilers.) [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
You can tell whether a man is clever by his
answers. You can tell whether a man is wise
by his questions.
-- Naguib Mahfouz