THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
12/22/06 -- Vol. 25, No. 25, Whole Number 1366
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Chili Peppers and Diabetes (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
This Is Your Brain. This Is Your Brain on Christmas.
(comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The Plot That Failed (film comments by Mark R. Leeper)
KING KONG, Cheat-Reading, and APOCALYPTO (letter of comment
by John Purcell)
Lunch-Time Tales (letter of comment by John Sloan)
This Week's Reading (DOM CASMURRO, MADAME BOVARY'S
OVARIES: A DARWINIAN LOOK THROUGH LITERATURE,
MADAME BOVARY, and BOUVARD AND PECUCHET)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Chili Peppers and Diabetes (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
As a fan of spicy food, I am always interested to see when hot
spices show up in the news, particularly health news. For a long
time spicy peppers got a bad rap as a cause of ulcers. We now
know that they actually help prevent ulcers. Spicy peppers are
good for you. There may be new uses for them.
One of those interesting moments in science happened just last
week in Canada. It seems that diabetes is sometimes made worse
by malfuctioning pain neurons in the pancreas. Scientists in
Canada were investigating if this sub-condition of diabetes can
be fixed by injecting capsaicin. That is the irritant that makes
chili peppers hot. Under certain circumstances it can be used to
fight pain. And the Canadian researchers wanted to see if they
could be used to ease this condition in diabetic mice. Well, the
answer turned out to be yes and no. Yes, the condition went
away. No, the mice were no longer diabetic. Apparently an
unexpected but notable side effect of this treatment is that it
cured the mice of diabetes.
Apparently this shows that the nervous system has an important
part in this (increasingly common) disease. It also suggests
that what works for mice couid conceivably work for people also.
There may be a Nobel Prize in this somewhere and a human cure for
diabetes.
See http://tinyurl.com/y7znor. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Is Your Brain. This Is Your Brain on Christmas.
(comments by Mark R. Leeper)
This time of year the stress of Christmas shopping is so mind-
numbing that it just seems to just drain people's intelligence.
It is something about hearing the same tired Christmas songs in
every store and grocery. It turns people into brain-dead zombies.
You think I am kidding? Would you believe there is one song that
even finds it necessary to incessantly remind shoppers who might
otherwise forget that "Christmas comes this time each year." Hey,
that's right. December 25. Wait a second. Does that means it's
never in the springtime???? Cosmic, man. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: The Plot That Failed (film comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Warning: This article contains movie spoilers. (Hopefully more
for viewers who have seen the films I talk about. But that is a
different story.) One could say I am spoiling for a fight.
Among my favorite sort of suspense film is one in which the main
character has to fight a plot that he does not understand. He
knows he is involved in something sinister, but he does not know
what it is. Very often the best prize of a suspense film is to
find out why was all was happening. It should be rewarding
enough to the viewer that he feels that the film was worth
sitting through. If it is not imaginative and creative and
sinister enough the viewer feels cheated on some level.
One film that lets the viewer down on some level is NORTH BY
NORTHWEST. You follow the Cary Grant character through all these
tribulations and near death, and what is it for? It is because
the James Mason character has a microfilm of something important
to him he wants to smuggle out of the country. We are not even
told what is on the film. At least in Hitchcock's classic THE
THIRTY-NINE STEPS he has you find out that the secret is an
airplane engine. In NORTH BY NORTHWEST you just know it is some
secret. That is a disappointment. Hitchcock felt it did not
matter and called the thing everybody wants but the viewer does
not know what it is a "McGuffin." Not everybody would agree, but
I think Hitchcock's use of McGuffins is really a weakness of his
films.
But one thing separates a very good suspense film from a great
one is can be how clever is the revealed plot. Even in some
popular stories, the secret plot is not very well thought out. In
the book GOLDFINGER the title character's plan was genuinely a
poor one. What Goldfinger was trying to do was obviously
impossible. It was so stupid--and this is very rare--it had to be
fixed up and made more intelligent in the film. The plot makes
only a little more sense in the film GOLDFINGER than it did in the
book. In the book Goldfinger really wanted to haul the gold out
of Fort Knox. Gold is heavy and moving any non-trivial percentage
of what is in Fort Knox would be a major engineering task. Ian
Fleming never really figured out how it would be done. Whether he
realizes it or not he counts on the audacity of the plan to
stupefy the viewer so there is not a lot of thought on whether it
makes sense. As an aside I have alsonever understood why
Goldfinger keeps James Bond around and alive. Bond supposedly
knows what the big project is about, but Goldfinger never
interrogates him. Goldfinger just seems to keep Bond as a pet.
Even some of the major suspense classic films do the same and
rarely do you see viewers asking themselves if after all is
revealed, does it make sense. And I am talking here about major
and strongly respected classics.
(Unfortunately it is hard to talk about surprise endings without
spoiling them, but I will assume that people who have not seen
these great films will avert their eyes.)
Consider what many have accepted as the greatest American
political thriller ever made, John Frankenheimer's THE MANCHURIAN
CANDIDATE. The problem with the plot of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
is that the conspirators' plan probably could not have worked.
The plan is to get a man assassinated, but that is only a means
to an end. What is important to the plotters is how they intend
that events will play out after that death. The problem is they
chose the wrong person to be their assassin. Just about anybody
else would be better.
The script explains (unconvincingly) why this particular assassin
was chosen, but it is still poor planning. All you would need is
one busboy seeing the shooter fleeing after the incident and it
would be all over. Or one person finding the prints of the killer
would ruin the entire plan. In the Kennedy assassination, Lee
Harvey Oswald was really a nobody. His actual motives are still
unknown and probably always will be. The intended killer in THE
MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE is not a nobody. He was very much a somebody
and a somebody connected to the politics of what was intended to
follow the killing. You might ask yourself what it would have
done to the Lyndon Johnson Presidency if it were discovered a
month into his presidency that Lee Harvey Oswald was working for
Lyndon Johnson's nephew. Johnson would probably have been
impeached just on suspicion. There is the same sort of problem
with THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE.
Another such film is Hitchcock's VERTIGO. I have never been
satisfied with the resolution of VERTIGO. The whole plan of the
villain assumes that the main character will recognize a location
from a vague description supposedly from a dream. It is expected
after hearing the dream that the main character will go to this
place in the dream at a specific time. The killer and the victim
will have to be at just the right place at just the right instant
of time. If the killer and victim were just ten minutes early the
victim would have started questioning what they were doing there
so long. Such a plot might be possible to execute today, now
that we have cellular telephones for instant communication, but
it would not have worked in the 1950s.
The people who write films have to be just as careful and clever
as the audience demands. I think that with VERTIGO and THE
MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE the audiences were so impressed with the
directors' virtuosity. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: KING KONG, Cheat-Reading, and APOCALYPTO (letter of comment
by John Purcell)
In response to Mark's article on KING KONG in the 12/15/06 issue
of the MT VOID, John Purcell writes, "Well, actually there is
indeed a leading man in King Kong for that love interest:
the titular character himself!" [-jp]
Mark replies, "Denham himself says that it is neither man nor
beast. How can Kong be Darrow's leading man for love interest?
Isn't that against the law?"
In response to Mark's article on cheat-reading in the same issue,
Purcell writes, "What you are describing in your "cheat-reading"
is a reading/study strategy I teach my students in my College
English classes." [-jp]
Mark responds, "You teach them to cheat-read? I'm shocked.
Shocked. (Wait. Am I eligible for royalties?)" [-mrl]
John goes on to say, "Considering the vast amount of reading
material they will be doing in college--depending on the major,
anywhere from 200 to 500 pages a week!--the thing to do is use
Active Reading, in which the reader questions, debates and
interacts with a text, ["Does the book ever win those debates?"
-mrl] plus looks at certain textual clues and sections to get a
basic understanding of the subject matter; they can dip into
reading entire paragraphs or pages here and there to answer
questions they have developed about the text. Your "cheat-
reading" is one aspect of this. Reading first and last
paragraphs, or just the first sentence of each paragraph, is one
of the suggested techniques of Active Reading. And it seems to
work quite well. It certainly sounds like you've found it a
worthwhile method." [-jp]
Mark replies, "Depending on that material. I run into problems
in saving much time with books that have one or two sentences per
paragraph. It is not really effective for most fiction. I would
caution people about using it much beyond recreational non-
fiction reading. And definitely no Agatha Christie." [-mrl]
John continues, "Active Reading--sometimes just speed reading,
too--works pretty well with all types of writing, too. I use it
myself all the time, especially this semester just ended since I
had to read eight novels by George Eliot in a fifteen-week time-
span, plus articles and texts I researched for the major term
paper for that course. If I hadn't, I would never have finished
the assigned class-readings on time. She was one long-winded
mid-Victorian author! I may never read anything else by or about
her for many a moon, if anything." [-jp]
Mark says, "Maybe for George Eliot it would work. It seems to me
that in fiction it is more likely that a plot point will occur
mid-paragraph. But it may actually work, even if it is not such
a new idea. Have you tried my plot graphing technique?" [-mrl]
In response to Mark's review of APOCALYPTO in the same issue,
John writes, "APOCALYPTO sounds like an interesting movie to see,
but it's not on my holiday viewing list. That is topped by
CASINO ROYALE, and ERAGON, with a couple others that I forget at
the moment. Mel Gibson as writer and director is definitely
going the epic route, isn't he?" [-jp]
Mark answers, "Certainly not the scholarly route. Trust only
what is in the art direction. Don't trust anything from the
script." [-mrl]
John continues, "Now if only Bravo would stop showing BRAVEHEART
eight times a week I might actually be more interested in seeing
APOCALYPTO. I think I am all Wallaced out!" [-jp]
Mark notes, "Don't trust the history there. I was really excited
about seeing the Battle of Stirling Bridge recreated. It was a
good piece of strategy. They turned it into a brute force
attack, even after Wallace says that you win battles by thinking
rather than brute force." [-mrl]
John closes, "Thanks for the issue, and I look forward to the
next installment. Keep up the good work in keeping us abreast of
reading and viewing material." [-jp]
"And thank you for reading and commenting." [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Lunch-Time Tales (letter of comment by John Sloan)
John Sloan sends us the following:
And now for something completely different from my usual blog
articles, more in keeping with MT VOID:
http://coverclock.blogspot.com/2006/12/lunch-time-tales.html
[-jls]
[Go read it before continuing--it is only about two hundred words
long.]
Mark replies:
What a source of energy a cow could be. It is better than the
electric car. When you want to drive someplace you just place
you energy cartridge (one cow) in the back of your car. When you
return home you have it recharge by going out to graze your back
yard.
1) Save on gasoline costs.
2) Save on mowing costs.
3) Have a source of milk and beef.
And the cow gets to see a bit of the world which has to be more
interesting than just grazing.
I am just wondering how to design a car to make a cow easy to
install and remove. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
DOM CASMURRO by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, translated by
John Gledson (ISBN 0-19-510308-4) is known for its "eccentric and
wildly unpredictable narrative style." I do not know if it had
gone on my to-read list because someone had suggested it had an
unreliable narrator (which I find interesting), or because I had
read something which recommended several Brazilian authors for
their odd styles. (I know I had the Brazilian author Fernando
Pessoa on my list from the same time.) In DOM CASMURRO, the
narrator is not unreliable, but is definitely quirky, prone to
digressions, and self-aware, often addressing the reader directly.
One of the things that struck me was that in Chapter LXXII, the
narrator proposes that "all plays should begin with their endings.
Othello would kill himself and Desdemona in the first act, the
three following ones would be given over to the slow and
decreasing process of jealousy, and the last would be left with
the initial scenes of the threat from the Turks, the explanations
of Othello and Desdemona, and the good advice of the subtle Iago:
'Put money in thy purse.' In this way, the spectator, on the one
hand, would find in the theater the regular puzzle that the
newspapers give him, for the final acts would explain the
denouement of the first, as a kind of witty conceit; and, on the
other hand, he would go to bed with a happy impression of
tenderness and love." All this is reminiscent of Philip K. Dick's
COUNTERCLOCK WORLD, of Martin Amis's TIME'S ARROW, MEMENTO, and
even of the much more mainstream BETRAYAL. [Mark also suggested
THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, depending on your point of view.] Of
course, some of those assume the actual backwards flow of time,
while others merely adopt a reversal of time in the narration.
MEMENTO and BETRAYAL embody the "puzzle" aspect, but TIME'S ARROW
definitely emphasizes the idea of going from unhappiness to
happiness.
[As an aside, this is the third reference to Othello I read in a
single week. One expects it, of course, in a book about
Shakespeare, and is not surprised to find it in a book about
reading literature through the lens of biology, but finding it in
an 19th century Brazilian novel is a bit unexpected.]
The book about reading literature through the lens of biology I
mention above is MADAME BOVARY'S OVARIES: A DARWINIAN LOOK
THROUGH LITERATURE by David P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash (ISBN
0-7394-6351-9). Before reading this, I read MADAME BOVARY by
Gustave Flaubert (ISBN 0-553-21341-5), although it turns out that
the Barashes spend only a small amount of time on Madame Bovary.
I guess they chose her for the title on the basis of a clever
word rhyme, rather than as the main topic of their book. The
book is more about biology, really, and how our genes influence
our actions and emotions, than about literature per se. The
literature merely reflects real life. For example, there is
plenty of jealousy in the real world, and "Othello" just reflects
that. This seems more of an attempt to bridge the gap between
C. P. Snow's two worlds (science and art) by introducing science
to people who might not ordinarily pick up a science book than to
preent some radically new literary theory.
Oh, and MADAME BOVARY? I think I am in the camp that asks why
this book is a classic. Flaubert is very good at descriptions,
but the plot is very pedestrian. BOUVARD AND PECUCHET by Gustave
Flaubert, translated by A. J. Krailsheimer (ISBN 0-140-44320-7)
gives Flaubert a better way to display his descriptions by doing
away with plot almost entirely. The title characters are two
clerks who take their savings and go off to try various
professions and hobbies: agriculture, philosophy, and so on.
They are incompetent at all of them, and Flaubert uses this as
his means of attacking the pretensions of the French of his time.
This was certainly more entertaining than Emma Bovary's
peccadilloes. [-ecl]
[I would think you would have have to ask Emma Bovary how
entertaining her peccadilloes were. --mrl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
The important thing is never to stop questioning.
-- Albert Einstein