THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
10/12/07 -- Vol. 26, No. 15, Whole Number 1462
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
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Topics:
Typos
A Red Hot News Flash (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
A Die-off of Tongues (Part 1) (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Real-Life TIE Fighters (letter of comment by Greg Frederick)
Westerns (letter of comment from Daniel Kimmel)
Public Libraries and Western Films (letter of comment
by Taras Wolansky)
A Poor Corrupt Official (letter of comment
by David F. Shallcross)
This Week's Reading (THURSDAY NEXT: FIRST AMONG SEQUELS,
A CROSS OF CENTURIES, and X-RATED BLOODSUCKERS)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Typos
I need to proofread a little better. Last week I got the titles
of two films wrong, as readers have pointed out. The correct
titles are THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES and UNFORGIVEN. [-mrl]
And so do I--last week's issue was Volume 26, Number *14*, not 13.
[-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: A Red Hot News Flash (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
My recreational drug of preference is in the news once again.
Yes, if I am to be perfectly honest with myself I have to admit to
being a capsaicin abuser. In my defense I will point out that
capsaicin is not illegal, immoral, or fattening. I am not sure it
is even addictive. I think that most health authorities accept
that if you are going to use a recreational drug, capsaicin is a
really good choice. And it gets a lot of good press. I was just
reading this article "Pain Relief without Numbness." It is a new
technique that will eliminate pain without causing a deadening of
all feeling. I picked up on the phrase "the new technique
involves an initial injection of hot pepper spice." I just have a
little skepticism. In the notorious "Gimpy's Chicken Wings of
Fire" incident I administered orally to myself a mega-dose of
capsaicin. I can tell you that for a few hours capsaicin did not
work at all effectively as a pain reliever.
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/071003_pain.htm
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: A Die-off of Tongues (Part 1) (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I was reading an article in the October 1 US NEWS & WORLD REPORT
called "A Future with Fewer Tongues: Half of languages are
dying." There are approximately 7000 different languages in the
world. Of these more than half are dying off. More than 3500 of
them are not likely to last out the century. Think about that.
That means a language will die on the average every three weeks
for the rest of the century. There are languages that only ten
people speak currently and they probably do not speak it most of
the time. The speakers have more commonly spoken languages that
they use. Now my first reaction was to ask myself, is the die-
off then such a bad thing? It seems at first brush to be a
fairly painless death. What is happening is that young people
are voluntarily learning and using the language of the dominant
culture. It would be one thing if they were being forced to
abandon the languages that they prefer to speak. That is not
really what is happening. What is happening is that young people
are finding that their entertainment and their livelihood require
them to use the language of the major culture in their area.
Some may be reluctant to abandon the language of Grandpa, but the
if they want to watch television or see a movie, it will probably
not be in Grandpa's language. More and more they only thing they
can do with the language is to speak to Grandpa, and when Grandpa
dies there will not be even that.
The downside of this is that a major piece of culture is lost.
The upside is that it makes life a lot easier when there is no
language barrier. It is a tradeoff.
In places like the United States not only are the arcane
languages dying, but some major languages are not used much at
all. Americans are notorious for believing that knowing only one
language is sufficient. You would think that language would be
English. For the most part you would be right, but there are
also people who know only Spanish and there are smaller groups
for which the one language is something else. But in America
much more than Europe we seem to be in large part monolingual.
Admittedly in Europe it may be easier to learn many different
languages. I suspect that most British, for example, do come in
contact with French-speakers early in their lives when it is
easiest to learn other languages, so it is easy to pick up
French. They may be less likely to do well with Swahili.
Until recently the only language that people really have had to
know in the United States has been English. And a lot of people
know only English. I suspect that in the next fifty years there
will be a lot more people in the main population who know Spanish
the way so many British know French.
A possible solution to the whole language problem at one time was
going to be Esperanto. If everybody spoke Esperanto as an easy-
to-learn second language, each person could communicate and he
could maintain whatever he wanted as his main language. It is a
nice theory, but getting everybody to cooperate is the problem.
It would work only if a sizable part of the population bought
into learning Esperanto. But the advocates of the language
started with nobody who spoke it and wanted to get everybody to
learn it. It is hard to go from nobody to almost everybody,
particularly when what we are talking about is the effort of
learning a language involved. At least for the foreseeable
future the de facto universal second language is English,
assuming that people do not speak it as a first language. I have
traveled to something like 55 countries and it is very hard to
find a place where you cannot get by on just English. Again a
big contributing factor to this is ubiquitous English-language
entertainment industry.
I wonder how much the threat of a threat the losing languages is.
At least in this country the loss of language is in large part
for lack of effort to save the language by the speakers of that
language. They speak a language, but do not pass it on to their
children. At least in this country that is their choice.
Certainly the people who are best in a position to save a dying
language is people who currently speak it. If they are not
committed to saving the language, who should be? It is hard to
come in as a third party and say that someone must teach a
language to an uninterested next generation. One can say he
wants to learn the language and preserve its literature, but that
is actually an invasive way of preserving a language and is not
very natural.
Next week I will discuss more on the positives and negatives of
making due with fewer human languages.
For more information:
http://tinyurl.com/2opp7e
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/070917_languages.htm
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Real-Life TIE Fighters (letter of comment by Greg Frederick)
Greg Frederick writes:
I read recently that NASA just launched the Dawn spacecraft which
will journey to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. This
craft will travel 3 billion miles using three ion drive engines.
And orbit or fly-by a few asteroids there. Read part of the
article from the Internet below. It will accelerate for six
years! It could never do that using conventional rocket fuel, so
that is why they are using the ion drive. It also has to stop at
a few asteroids.
"Dawn carries 937 pounds (425 kilograms) of Xenon gas, to
which it gives an electric charge to create ions that are then
catapulted out of its engines at nearly 90,000 miles per hour
(144,840 kph). Over time, the ion push builds up, and allows
Dawn to change its flight path to first rendezvous, then
orbit, multiple targets like Vesta and Ceres without requiring
massive amounts of conventional rocket fuel.
"The first time I ever heard of ion propulsion was in a 'Star
Trek' episode," said Rayman, adding that such engines are also
touted to propel the TIE fighters--or Twin Ion Engine--of
"Star Wars" fame. "Dawn does the TIE fighter one better
because it has three ion engines."
While it will take Dawn four days to go from zero to 60 miles
per hour (96 kph), the probe will gradually pick up speed as
it fires its ion drive nonstop for the next six years, NASA
has said, adding that the mission is the agency's first
operational science expedition powered by ion propulsion."
It's interesting how sometimes science will develop ideas and
concepts from science fiction. I realize that many times science
fiction is coming up with ideas that do not ever materialize in
our everyday world but it is neat when that imagination sparks a
good idea that can be practical. [-gf]
Mark responds:
Did you see the film THE AVIATOR? It presents Howard Hughes as a
genius of aviation. He did not do all the engineering himself,
by a long shot. But he had an instinct for knowing what
innovations in aircraft he should ask his engineers to work on.
He had a feel for what comes next. He said something like, "put
in a stronger engine and make it a monoplane rather than a
biplane." A feeling of what comes next is very important in
creating the future.
Science fiction is very poor as a predictor of the future. There
are so many possible futures and no expert knows what future will
come to pass. But it gives people an instinct for what is
possible and what comes next. It is no coincidence that wen we
got pocket telephones they ended up looking a lot like Star Trek
communications devices. You come away from Star Trek with the
feeling that there should be a pocket communication device and
should be able to just pick it up and flip the lid back and there
is your communicator. Part of this is that when you produce a
science fiction series you have to think about what would a
pocket communicator be like. You might be one of the first
people who ever gave it any thought. Maybe the ideas for the
best design were "low-hanging fruit" that the first people to
think seriously about the problem would find. Or maybe people
just come away from a program like "Star Trek" with the idea that
a flip-open communicator is a cool idea. But science fiction
does seem to influence the real world.
(If TIE really does stand for Twin Ion Engine--which it does--
doesn't that make a TIE fighter a sitting duck?) [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Westerns (letter of comment from Daniel Kimmel)
In response to Mark's two-part article on Western films in the
09/28/07 and 10/05/07 issues of the MT VOID, Dan Kimmel writes,
"Interesting choices of which we are mostly in agreement. When I
teach westerns I conclude with LONELY ARE THE BRAVE as the
ultimate 'end of the west' Western. They've already seen
UNFORGIVEN and THE SHOOTIST at that point, so this is just taking
things a little further." [-dk]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Public Libraries and Western Films (letter of comment by
Taras Wolansky)
In response to Evelyn's comments on public libraries in the
10/05/07 issue of the MT VOID, Taras Wolanksy writes, "On the
issue of SF classics being discarded by public libraries: I
practice what I call 'guerrilla librarianship'. When I go to the
library I often check out a few great SF books; leave them in my
car; then return them on my next visit. Books which show
circulation are less likely to be 'deaccessioned'. [-tw]
And in response to Mark's comments on Westerns in the 09/28/07
and 10/05/07 issues, Taras writes:
Mark overlooks what is sometimes considered the best Western of
all time: John Ford's THE SEARCHERS (1956), which was selected as
the best American film (of any genre!) of the sound era by
CAHIERS DU CINEMA in the early 1970s. And then there is Howard
Hawks' RED RIVER (1948), which is so iconic, Peter Bogdanovich
chose it to epitomize the closing of the frontier, in The Last
Picture Show (1971); in fact, it's literally the last picture
show in the dying town's closing theater.
John Wayne turned down HIGH NOON because it didn't make sense to
him. And I think he was right: if the badge means so little to
you that you will grind it in the dirt, why did you risk your
life to uphold it? But then, this film is an allegory, rather
than a picture of the Old West. (Wayne had the advantage--or
disadvantage?--of being much closer culturally and
psychologically to the people of the Old West than most people in
modern Hollywood were or are.)
Siskel & Ebert praised UNFORGIVEN* (1992) for casting a black man
(Morgan Freeman) in a role written for a white man. Which,
ironically, is the one aspect of the film I find most, um,
unforgivable! Because at the time of the story, whipping a white
man and whipping a black man were very different things. If the
black man were a former slave with whip marks on him already, or
if he didn't have any marks, in either case there would have been
comment. So S&E praised the film precisely for being
unrealistic. (*According to IMDB, *THE* UNFORGIVEN is the title
of the 1960 movie with Burt Lancaster and Audrey Hepburn.) [-tw]
Mark responds:
THE SEARCHERS was not overlooked. I mentioned it in the first
installment. I do not like it quite as much as other people do.
To me it is a good Western and not great. There were no films on
the top ten list that I felt I wanted to take off to put it on.
RED RIVER the same is true of, but I did not mention that one.
I knew that Wayne did not particularly like HIGH NOON, where the
sheriff is so anxious to get the town to help him stand up to the
Miller Gang. Wayne thought that wasn't man-like and made RIO
BRAVO with a similar situation, but the sheriff wants to handle
everything himself so other people do not hurt. His character
proves Wayne's point by without help blowing the heck out of the
outlaw gang, just like the script was written. And he does it
with so much ease there is time for a song from both Dean Martin
and Ricky Nelson, just like the script was written. That is
because John Wayne in that film is a *real man*, just like the
script was written. I noticed that the badge meant a lot to Gary
Cooper's character in HIGH NOON and then he throws it on the
ground. (I don't think he grinds it.) I interpreted that to
mean that the character changed over the course of the film. He
came to realize how little the principles he had fought for
really meant to the people in the town. Wayne did not change
very much in the course of RIO BRAVO. He didn't have to. He is
John Wayne. He plays an archetype, not a real person. I
disagree with your comment Wayne was "much closer culturally and
psychologically to the people of the Old West than most people in
modern Hollywood were or are." Actually I think he was a lot
closer to the characters in the old dime novels than he was to
the people who really lived in the West. Perhaps there were a
handful of people who were larger than life, just like any time
and place, but his type of character was a long way from being
typical of the real west. At least that is my understanding.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: A Poor Corrupt Official (letter of comment by David
F. Shallcross)
In response to Mark's use of the phrase "a poor corrupt official"
in his review of John Stanley's I WAS A TV HORROR HOST in the
10/05/07 issue of the MT VOID, David Shallcross writes,"You are
'only a poor corrupt official'? I presume and hope that this is a
literary reference of sort, possibly Chinese. Would you enlighten
me?" [-dfs]
Mark replies:
It took me a little time to remind myself where I had said it.
Claude Rains to Humphrey Bogart in CASABLANCA:
[Rick and Captain Renault discussing Victor Laszlo's chances
of escaping Casablanca.]
Captain Louis Renault: This is the end of the chase.
Rick Blaine: Twenty thousand francs says it isn't.
Captain Louis Renault: Is that a serious offer?
Rick Blaine: I just paid out twenty. I'd like to get it back.
Captain Louis Renault: Make it ten. I'm only a poor corrupt
official.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
In THURSDAY NEXT: FIRST AMONG SEQUELS (ISBN-13 978-0-670-03871-8,
ISBN-10 0-670-03871-7), the fifth in the series that began with
THE EYRE AFFAIR, Jasper Fforde is back at the top of his form.
He has the usual punning character names (e.g., Cherie Yogert,
Cliff Hangar, Harris Tweed), but also more subtle character names,
such as Isambard Kingdom Bunuel, "the finest and most surreal book
engineer.... When he constructed WAR AND PEACE, no one thought
that anything of such scale and grandeur *could* be built, let
alone launched...." If you don't get the joke, maybe this book is
not for you.)
Fforde also deals with the mechanics of Book World. "Books suffer
wear and tear, just the same as hip joints, cars and reputations.
For this reason all books have to go into the maintenance bay for
a periodic refit, either every thirty years or every million
years, whichever comes first. For those books that suffer a high
initial readership but then lose it through boredom or
insufficient reader intellect, a partial refit may be in order.
Salmon Thrusty's intractable masterpiece THE DEMONIC COUPLETS had
had its first two chapters rebuilt six times, but the rest is
relatively unscathed."
The plot revolves around Thursday attempts to deal with the
decline in reading rates, and the attempt to improve them with
such devices as interactive reality shows of the classics. The
decline is illustrated by Thursday going to Booktastic!, which
now has three coffeehouses (one with a branch of itself *inside*
itself), DVDs, stationary, gifts, computer games, and a staff
that has no idea what a book is:
"I was wondering if you had any books."
"Any *what*?"
"Books. Y'know--about so big and full of words arranged in a
specific order to give the effect of reality?"
"You mean DVDs?"
"No, I mean *books*. They're kind of old-fashioned."
"Ah!" she said. "What you mean are *videotapes*."
"No, what I mean are *books*."
We'd exhausted the sum total of her knowledge, so she went
into default mode. "You'll have to see the manager."
There's lots more like this, with Fforde taking a good look at
just what is causing the drop in reading, and what it might lead
to, and how to counteract it. In quality, this *is* "First Among
Sequels"--the best in the series since THE EYRE AFFAIR itself.
Highly recommended.
(Note: Some people try to purchase all the books in a series they
like in matching editions. I have to figure out what edition to
buy to maintain my record: I have the other books in the series
with no two matching. My copy of THE EYRE AFFAIR is a US Viking
hardback, LOST IN A GOOD BOOK is a US Viking trade paperback, THE
WELL OF LOST PLOTS is a UK Penguin trade paperback, and SOMETHING
ROTTEN is a NEL trade paperback.)
A CROSS OF CENTURIES edited by Michael Bishop (ISBN-13
978-1-56025-926-8, ISBN-10 1-56025-926-4) is a collection of
stories, mostly reprints, dealing with Jesus in some form or
other. This is a collection that may appeal more to believers
(although too specific a belief may also be an obstacle). Worth
noting is that Bishop says in his introduction, "Finally, I want
to acknowledge contributor Barry Malzberg's insightful objection
to any and all theme anthologies: the loss of surprise and so of
pleasure attending readers' awareness that at some point, in some
way, the tale before them absolutely *must* deal with an aspect of
that theme." (But this did not stop Malzberg from allowing the
inclusion of his own story "Understanding Entropy"--nor is there
any reason why it should.)
X-RATED BLOODSUCKERS by Mario Acevedo (ISBN-13 978-0-06-083327-5,
ISBN-10 0-060-83327-0) is a first-person hard-boiled detective
novel with a twist: the detective is also a vampire. Frankly, it
frequently seemed like too much, with the writing about the
vampirism getting in the way of the writing about the detection.
The plot itself deals with vampirism, which is fine, but long
descriptions of the need to find blood, repetitions of how bland
food is without blood, and so on, brought the story to a
screeching halt (for me, anyway). Also, it could be that Acevedo
is using a more colloquial Spanish than I learned, but "queen" is
"reina", not "rena" (with a tilde over the 'n'), and "Chicano"
refers to Mexicans, not Panamanians or other Latin Americans
("Latino" is the more general term). The work is an unusual
combination of genres, and I cannot say it is bad, just that I
thought there was too much for Acevedo to juggle. You may
disagree. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries
disappear and life stands explained.
-- Mark Twain