THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
08/29/08 -- Vol. 27, No. 9, Whole Number 1508
El Honcho Grande: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
La Honcha Bonita: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
The Jewish-Chinese-Food Connection (comments by
Mark R. Leeper)
Science Fiction Book Club (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
THE DARK KNIGHT (letter of comment by Taras Wolansky)
This Week's Reading (ODD JOHN, STAR MAKER, and SIRIUS)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: The Jewish-Chinese-Food Connection (comments by Mark
R. Leeper)
Several years ago I got a new office-mate who happened to be
Chinese. We were chatting one day and I mentioned I thought that
Chinese and Jews were a lot alike. "How so?" he wanted to know?
Well, our attitudes on a lot of things are similar. His son
would go to Chinese school after his school ended and the son was
not really happy about it. It reminded me of my having to go to
Hebrew school under similar conditions. His son also had to go
to piano lessons. This too is a lot like Jews would do. Both
groups favor education and culture, and especially for the young.
Historically, Chinese children all studied for the civil service
examination in China. It was the main path to success. Jewish
kids studied for the Bar Mitzvah and to learn the complex language
of Hebrew. The family is very important in both cultures, as is a
strong work ethic. (Side note: I loaned him the film FIDDLER ON
THE ROOF. His father watched it and commented that it was a very
Chinese sort of story.) And there is another similarity I told
him about. Both cultures seem to really like Chinese food.
The fact is that Jews do seem to have a special affinity for
Chinese food. A lot of Caucasians seem to like Chinese food
also, but not like the Jews do. It is something of a mystery why
so many Jews seem to be keen on egg rolls, fried dumplings, chow
fun, moo shoo, and the whole thing. Or most of the thing. I
read or heard that some place--I think it was a neighborhood in
the Washington DC area--had the greatest density of Chinese
restaurants in the country. Yet it did not have that high a
Chinese population density. Why? Well, a restaurant owner said
that the reason was that it was heavily Jewish neighborhood. Jews
just seem to love Chinese food. Who would have thought it? Is
their food all that similar? Certainly superficially it would not
seem to be. And as Jewish comic Jackie Mason pointed out, you
never see an old Chinese man walking around saying "I'm looking
for a good piece of gefilte fish."
Question: In any urban area of the country what day of the year
is the most busy in Chinese restaurants? In fact, in New York
City Chinese restaurants do twice the business on this one day of
the year than on their second busiest day. You might think it is
Chinese New Year? No, the answer is Christmas Day. So why do
Chinese eateries do such a good business on Christmas? It is not
the Christians leaving their presents, trees, and wreathes for egg
rolls. Christians are generally home with their families. But you
have a whole lot of Jews who have the day off and not much to do.
For many Jews the tradition is dinner and a show. The show changes
from one year to the next, of course. The dinner cuisine stays
the same. It is, of course, Chinese. The Italian Restaurants
are closed. The barbecue restaurants are locked tight like a
drum. The Four Seasons has an armed guard posted out front to
chase away trespassers. The non-Christian Chinese are open for
business as usual (only more crowded). So it's "Shalom, and
welcome" at Madam Ming's Garden.
So why is it Jews go in for Chinese and not so much for Mexican
or Italian or French? There has been a lot of speculation. I
will look at what two different people have to say. Jennifer
8 Lee has a numerical middle name and a book on Chinese food
called THE FORTUNE COOKIE CHRONICLES that looks at this issue
among others. An anonymous blogger using the penname Mortart has
an article "The Jewish love affair with Chinese food" at
http://tinyurl.com/3vto7m. Here are some of their suggestions
and some of my own.
If one goes to an Italian or Mexican restaurant one generally
sees dishes that mix dairy and meat products. Well, if the Jews
were really *serious* about Kosher they would not be eating in a
non-Kosher restaurant in the first place. They already have a
little guilt for eating in the wrong place. That's okay. Jews
like guilt. It makes them feel alive. "Ich habe shuldig ergo
sum." But that does not mean they are going to let themselves go
out and order Veal Parmigiana either. They don't even want to be
distracted by it on the menu. And they don't want to see someone
else enjoying it either. Oriental cuisines rarely use dairy.
Also, you are never in a Chinese restaurant on Saint Anybody's
day or the Feast of San Someone. The decor is not Christian. It
is nice and neutral. Lee seems to think that Chinese see Jews as
part of the establishment and almost Anglo-Saxon. Supposedly
that feels good to Jews. Or perhaps Chinese is just another
exotic outsider ethnicity Jews can feel a kinship to. I will
reserve judgment on that one.
But it might be right that even if eating Chinese food did not
make Jews feel Anglo Saxon, it might have made them feel
sophisticated and cosmopolitan. They were demonstrating that
they were open to other cuisines and other ways of doing things.
They did not feel they had to eat only the food they were raised
with. And it is not like flanken, gefilte fish, and chopped
liver are real lip-smackers either.
Mortart thinks the two cuisines have more in common than it may
first appear. Chinese like dumplings, and for Jews it is
kreplach. Chinese, of course, have noodles and for Jews that dish
is like lukshen. Both use garlic, onions, and cabbage. After a
meal both can appreciate a nice glass of tea. Then the Jews stir
in some sugar, the Chinese give a pained expression. And each
thinks the other is a barbarian. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Science Fiction Book Club (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
I saw a flyer at the Worldcon for the Science Fiction Book Club.
It is now under new editorship (after decades with Ellen Asher),
so I was curious to see what it was like.
They still have their offer of five books for $1 (plus shipping
and handling) if you promise to buy four more books in two years.
But of the fifty choices for these five books, I found only three
I would have been interested in if I did not have them already (a
Charles Stross, a Terry Pratchett, and a Robert Charles Wilson).
Even then, I'm not sure I'd want the Pratchett in hardcover, as all
my other Pratchetts are in mass-market paperback.
All this makes me think that even if I could find two more books
for the five, finding another four in two years might be difficult.
(One approach, I suppose, is to find a friend with different
tastes and share a membership.)
One oddity I noticed was that they had books titled "Erotic
Fantasy Art" and "Fantasy Art", but no book titled "Science
Fiction Art". [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE DARK KNIGHT (letter of comment by Taras Wolansky)
In response to Mark's review of THE DARK KNIGHT in the 08/01/08
issue of the MT VOID, Taras Wolansky writes:
Belated comment (I was a bit under the weather):
Reading your review of THE DARK KNIGHT, I mulled over the reasons why
I'm the village atheist where this film is concerned. Or, perhaps,
like the Charles Addams character who grins from ear to ear as the
rest of the movie audience sobs into their handkerchiefs.
The comic book movies of the summer I really liked--IRON MAN and
HANCOCK--have an important feature in common: complex characters
that grow and change. By contrast, the main characters in THE
DARK KNIGHT--Batman and the Joker--are one-dimensional and
unchanging. I had a hard time sitting through the movie,
especially after I made the mistake of looking at my watch when
the Joker was captured (for the first time!), and discovered I
faced another whole hour of, as it were, plastic punching robots
bashing away at each other.
Another factor is something that spoiled most of the James Bond
films for me: the protagonist's relationships with women were not
meaningful.(*) (I'm sure you can guess the one classic Bond film
I liked!). By contrast, there is real chemistry between the
star-crossed lovers in HANCOCK, and between Tony Stark and Pepper
Potts in IRON MAN. Who love each other but will not become
lovers--because they both know Stark is a slut. (Notice, we only
see him sleep with a woman he despises.)
A third reason I disliked THE DARK KNIGHT is probably one of the
major reasons it made so much money. It combines the superhero
and serial killer movie genres. As depicted here, the Joker is a
typical movie serial killer: he knows what other people will do
before they do, and can always predict how they will react--
except, typically, at the very end. And his plots, no matter how
preposterous, always work - except, again, at the very end.
Like other movie serial killers, the Joker blathers on and on, the
other characters apparently spellbound by his sophomoric
utterances. I kept hoping someone would say, "Oh, shut up!" and
stick a gag in his mouth. I tired of the character after the
first half-hour. ("Sacrilege!" Hey, I told you I was the village
atheist.)
On the other hand, the film's politics made me chuckle. To catch
the Joker, Bruce "Big Brother" Wayne makes every cell phone in
Gotham City a spy cam: "Total Information Awareness", anyone?
(The Bush administration was attacked for wanting to data mine the
Net for terrorist plots shortly after 9/11.)
*When I saw Batman Begins, I blamed it on Katie Holmes' curiously
sedated performance, but Maggie Gyllenhaal is no improvement. Why
she was cast is a mystery; imagine what a Sarah Michelle Gellar,
say, might have done with the role. [-tw]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Last week I discussed LAST AND FIRST MEN at great length. This
week I will cover Stapledon's three other major works of fiction.
(Remember that I said that several of Stapledon's works of
fiction are not novels in the traditional sense, but I may still
occasionally use that word as a shorthand.)
I skipped LAST MEN IN LONDON, Stapledon's second novel, feeling
it was more important to refresh myself about his four primary
novels. His third novel, ODD JOHN (1935), is a superman story.
If LAST AND FIRST MEN was inspired by H. G. Wells's THE TIME
MACHINE, then ODD JOHN may have owed something to Philip Wylie's
GLADIATOR (which preceded it by five years). I cannot say for
sure my reaction to John the first time I read it, but this time
around he seemed a thoroughly reprehensible sort, willing to
commit murder, human experimentation, and even genocide without
any compunction, because he is, after all, a superior being.
Once again, we have Stapledon presenting a very fascist,
racialist view of the world, and we have the distressing feeling
that he endorses it rather than shows it as a warning. The
narrator is called "Fido" by John, and a fair name it is, as
"Fido" shows a ridiculously high level of devotion to John--and a
low level of moral concern.
[On the panel, Robert Silverberg pointed out that liking the main
character was not necessary for a book to be great, or even good,
e.g., CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, or LOLITA. In fact, there was a long
digression into LOLITA and whether Humbert Humbert was not indeed
the victim and Lolita the most negative character. Also
presented was the notion of Odd John as a superior character with
a tragic flaw, a la classic Greek drama. All this is true, and
the parallel to Greek drama is the most convincing argument to
me. I guess it was the feeling that I was supposed to sympathize
at least somewhat that bothered me, and when people say they like
this book because they read it when they were young and felt that
they were outsiders the way John was, that just reinforces my
feeling.]
STAR MAKER (1937) is the most poetical of the four major novels.
It is also the least science fictional, in the sense of being
more a work of fantasy, or even of theosophy, than of science
fiction. While Stapledon discusses planets, stars, galaxies, and
so on, his basis is not science. Indeed, his notion of the
mechanics of planetary formation is very outdated: "I knew well
that the birth of planets was due to the close approach of two or
more stars, and that such accidents must be very uncommon." (page
266)
He also misunderstands evolution, saying, "Presently the stage
was clear for some worm or amoeba to reinaugurate the great
adventure of biological evolution toward the human plane." (page
331) Stapledon assumes that evolution has an ultimate goal and
that that goal is humanity (or intelligence, if you prefer). But
this is not true--the "goal" of evolution (or rather, its effect)
is creating organisms best suited for their environment.
In STAR MAKER, Stapledon again describes most (if not all) the
advanced world orders as communistic, but in a very Stalinist
way: "Indeed, a highly specialized bureaucracy, or even a world-
dictator, might carry out the business of organizing the world's
activity with legally absolute power, but under constant
supervision by popular will expressed through the radio. We were
amazed to find that in a truly awakened world even a dictatorship
could be in essence democratic." (page 348) Stapledon seems
either amazingly obtuse, or amazingly optimistic, in 1937 to
still expect that a dictatorship could be so benign and so easily
controlled. (Isn't the very essence of absolute power the
ability to silence one's opponents?)
But as Leslie Fiedler says in OLAF STAPLEDON: A MAN DIVIDED,
Stapledon's goal was not scientific (or economic), and later
science fiction writers "are responding to the challenge which
Stapledon made clear constituted a chief raison d'etre for the
genre: to replace traditional mythologies of a universe tailored
to the human scale with one which--without falsifying the
findings of modern science or denying the terror they have
stirred in all our hearts--can redeem them for the imagination."
(page 348)
STAR MAKER is in many ways primarily a book of poetry. In
Stapledon's "On every side was confusion, a rising storm, great
waves already drenching our rock. And all around, in the dark
welter, faces and appealing hands, half-seen and vanishing" (page
431), for example, I hear the influence of Matthew Arnold's
"Dover Beach":
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
The last of Stapledon's major novels is SIRIUS (1944), about a
dog brought up to human intelligence. This may be the most
accessible of Stapledon's fiction. Just as Stapledon's other
works seemed to have been inspired or influenced by earlier
writers, SIRIUS seems to be a descendent of Mary Shelley's
FRANKENSTEIN (perhaps by way of Wells's THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR
MOREAU). The Frankenstein connection is most obvious when Sirius
bemoans his isolation, saying, "Why did you make me without a
world for me to live in. It's as though God made Adam and not
bothered to make Eden, nor Eve...."
On the other hand, some of the old attitudes are still there.
The mother of Sirius's human companion, Plaxy, has been convinced
to raise Plaxy and Sirius together equally, and when Sirius is
injured, feels the same love toward him she feels toward Plaxy.
Now, I am not a mother, but I can't help but feel that a human
mother would feel more love and attachment to a human child than
to a dog, no matter how much the two were raised together. This
makes Elizabeth another in the line of women that Stapledon seems
to get wrong--mostly by making them almost sub-human.
Stapledon was chosen for the first Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery
Award (given annually by Readercon). (Silverberg was on the jury
that year.) Why Stapledon is neglected, or indeed whether he is
neglected, was discussed. Among average readers, he is virtually
unknown. but among science fiction authors he is often a major
influence (see quotes below). Pretty much everyone in the
audience had read him, but that is not too surprising. Most
obviously, panels of this sort about particular authors attract
readers of that authors. But also, the sort of person likely to
go to a panel on any older author is likely to be the sort that
reads older authors in general. That is, someone who has read
only science fiction published in the last ten years is unlikely
to go to any retrospective panel, even on better-known authors
such as Heinlein or Asimov.
Silverberg thought one reason for the neglect was that Stapledon
had never been published in mass-market paperback. This turns
out not to be true--there were Berkley mass-market editions of
ODD JOHN and STAR MAKERS in the 1960s, and Penguin editions of
SIRIUS and LAST & FIRST MEN/LAST MEN IN LONDON (omnibus edition)
in the 1970s, as well as a Sphere edition of NEBULA MAKER. But
those these came and went fairly quickly, the irony is that
Stapledon is one of the few science fiction authors of the 1930s
who has had his major works in print continuously for the last
half century or so. Dover Books has had his four major works of
fiction in print as two omnibus editions at least since I was in
college. So while in some ways neglected, Stapledon is also in
some ways the most available of science fiction authors.
(Silverberg, I believe, referred to him as the "least neglected
unjustly neglected author.")
And a few quotes about Olaf Stapledon:
Sir Arthur C. Clarke [on LAST AND FIRST MEN]: "With its
multimillion year vistas, and its roll call of great but doomed
civilizations, the book produced an overwhelming impact on me."
Freeman Dyson [on STAR MAKER]: "It seemed to me perfectly obvious
that this was the way to think about space and about the future--
that kind of broad scope, that kind of scale."
Stanislaw Lem [on LAST AND FIRST MEN and ODD JOHN]: "[These]
opened new endless perspectives, gigantic possibilities for an
ongoing construction of hitherto unarticulated hypotheses."
[-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Everything of importance has been said before,
by someone who did not discover it.
-- Alfred North Whitehead