THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
10/17/08 -- Vol. 27, No. 16, Whole Number 1515
El Honcho Grande: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
La Honcha Bonita: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Concert (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Great Minds? (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The Financial Crisis for Dummies (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Goya Come to Joisey (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Politics (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
WE ARE WIZARDS (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
Product Placement and ROLLBACK (letter of comment
by Robert Sawyer)
AT&T (letter of comment by Steve Lelchuk)
Product Placement and the Disney Channel (letter of comment
by Dave Anolick)
Product Placement in THE LAST MIMZY (letter of comment
by Frank Leisti)
This Week's Reading (THE ARABIAN NIGHTS) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Concert (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I went to a classical chamber music concert. But when I was
sitting down they slammed the door of the classical chamber and
piped in "Classical Gas". [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Great Minds? (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I just finished writing about product placements in films and the
IO9 site just did a piece tracing the history of product placements
in science fiction films:
http://tinyurl.com/3mz4g6
===================================================================
TOPIC: The Financial Crisis for Dummies (comments by Mark R.
Leeper)
Of late I have been looking for sources that can explain this
county's financial woes in clear lucid form. I am, after all, not
an investment banker. (At least I am not one to my knowledge.
Things change quickly these days.) Anyway if you listen to
discussions and explanations you soon find yourself sinking in the
La Brea Financial Technical Jargon Pit. I have found three sources
that are trying to explain the crisis clearly and cleanly.
I listen regularly to Chicago Public Radio's program The American
Life. They did a program explaining the mortgage crisis that I
thought explained things as they stood at the time fairly lucidly.
It can be found for listening online or for downloading a
transcript at:
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=355
They have done a couple other programs since and they do have a
talent for talking about financial matters in a way the listener
can understand. (I will give you more links later.)
Apparently someone at National Public Radio International decided
there was room for new program that on a periodic basis would
explain finance for dummies. They named the new program Planet
Money. Sadly for them they came on board just as the balloon went
up. For now their periodic broadcasts are every weekday.
Operating that fast they are losing the battle against jargon, but
still much of what they say is interesting and comprehensible.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/
They recommended another good site, The Baseline Scenario. They
have a good explanation and links to several of the above sites.
It would be a good idea to explore these sites. They make this
material really fairly interesting. That is at:
http://baselinescenario.com/financial-crisis-for-beginners/
And check out the various links off this page.
I was considering turning all I learned from these sites into an
editorial, but who would believe I knew anything about the
financial crisis? Worse yet, they might assume I know more than I
actually do and start asking me questions I didn't understand. I
decided it was best to just tell people where to look. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Goya Come to Joisey (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Those readers who live near Rutgers University have an unusual
opportunity. (But even if you don't live there I have links below
so you can still have the same experience.) From now to December
14, 2008, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (really the art
museum of the Rutgers Campus) is having an exhibition (free with
the $3 general museum admission) called "Dark Dreams: The Prints of
Francisco Goya". The main part of the exhibit is prints from "Los
Caprichos" and "Los Disparates".
These prints and I go back a long way. Back when I was fourteen or
fifteen I loved monster stories. (Come to think of that, I never
grew out of it.) I found a book called MONSTERS GALORE by
Bernhardt J. Hurwood. This book collected classic stories,
fiction, and folklore about monsters. The book was illustrated
with pictures of monsters from folklore including Japanese prints
of Yokai monsters, woodcuts of werewolves, penny-dreadful
illustrations, detail from the work of Hieronymous Bosch, and five
or six prints from "Los Caprichos" ("The Caprices"). The prints
showed gargoyle-like creatures paring their toenails, people who
were half-human and half animal, bird creatures, and witches
flying. What is more they were considered to be fine art. It was
the first inclination I remember seeing that fine art and my pet
interests need not have been in separate worlds.
Dover Books had low-priced editions not just of "Los Caprichos" but
also of the similar prints in "Los Disparates", so I got to own the
complete set. And I think when I visited the Prado in Madrid I saw
the original prints of the complete set (along with a nice
collection of other surrealist masters such as Bosch and Brueghel).
Being prints, there are more than one copy of "Los Caprichos" and
"Los Disparates" going around to art museums, and this was a chance
to see them in the original form.
The two sets of prints are really sort of political cartoons, but
they are nightmarish images of grotesquely distorted people and
animals and things that appear to be combinations of both and other
monsters. People are often very ugly, but it is a beautiful and
fascinating ugliness. "The Caprichos" often are on the theme that
the imagination without reason produces nightmares and monsters.
The individual prints, like the stories in GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, may
have lost their contemporary context, but the images are
unforgettable. See for yourself at the link below. With "Los
Caprichos" Goya satirizes the Church, ignorance, class, courtship,
marriage, and the Inquisition. Goya gives us eighty images that
have a sort of evolution. He starts with distorted satirical
pictures of the people around him. Some of the situations are just
exaggerated and some are rather bizarre. About his 19th image he
starts having creatures half human and half chicken. By his 37th
he has anthropoid donkeys. One has a donkey looking at pictures of
his ancestors to be certain they are of pure blood, much as
Inquisition used to discriminate the pure-blooded Spanish from
those who had Jewish or Muslim blood. At number 43 he has an
illustration that the sleep of reason creates monsters. After that
the images are perfect for the Halloween season. In one a person
seems more goat than human. Winged gargoyles fly the night and
trim their toenails. Witches ride brooms.
Goya first offered the set for sale in 1799, but the Inquisition
was not happy about the way they criticized Spanish society in
general and the Inquisition in particular. Goya had to remove them
from sale. Instead he gave or sold them to the King, so few copies
remain.
To see Los Caprichos see
http://www.gasl.org/refbib/Goya__Caprichos.pdf.
For translations of the captions see
http://goya.unizar.es/infoGoya/Work/CaprichosIcn.html.
Goya followed up this collection with 22 more etchings, "Los
Disparates" ("The Follies"). These are in somewhat the same vein,
but more reserved. These were drawn from 1816 to 1824. The prints
were not published until Goya's death and even the order he wanted
them shown or if the set is complete is unknown. The quality of
some of the prints rivals his earlier work, but in general the set
is not as well remembered. The sketches can be seen from links
from http://eeweems.com/goya/disparates_01.html.
Or you can go to the art museum at Rutgers and see the real prints.
Not a bad outing for the Halloween season. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Politics (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
I am reading a book about Jorge Luis Borges (and so yet another
Borgesian column will eventually appear), but this quote from
Borges is far too topical to hold until then:
"Creo que ningun politico puede ser una persona totalamente
sincera. Un politico esta buscando siempre electores y dice lo que
esperan que diga. En el caso do un discurso politico los que
opinan son los oyentes. mas que el orador. El orador es una
especia de espejo o eco de lo que los demas piensan. Si no es asi,
fracasa."
Which I translate as:
"I believe that no politician can be a wholly sincere person. A
politician is always looking at the voters and says what they want
him to say. On the case of a political discourse it is the
listeners whose opinion is expressed more than the speaker's. The
speaker is a type of mirror or echo of what others think. If this
is not so, he loses." [-ecl]
[This makes politicians almost God-like. I notice that God always
seems to say exactly what his listener is pre-disposed to hear.
What the audience loves, God loves. What the audience hates, God
hates. -mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: WE ARE WIZARDS (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: The growing phenomenon of fandom of the Harry Potter books
and films is examined in several of its manifestations in this
documentary. From four-year-old "Wizard Rock" punk rock stars to
the Warner Brothers battle to close down the web sites of fans of
their own films director Josh Koury looks at the multiple threads
of the Potter fandom movement. He goes back and forth among the
threads, but he could have used a few more threads and his camera
was not always on the most interesting material.
Rating: low +1 (-4 to +4) or 5/10
Somewhere in another part of the forest, where Muggles like me do
not see it, there has grown a huge fandom for Harry Potter. I
mean, if you think that "Star Wars" had a big fan base, it was
Yoda-sized compared to Potter fandom. If you thought "Star Trek"
had an active fandom, they were Hortas compared to Potter fandom.
WE ARE WIZARDS examines the growing phenomenon of Harry Potter
fandom, but sadly not nearly with the breadth that we might have
hoped for. WE ARE WIZARDS is a new documentary that examines eight
or nine threads of the Harry Potter phenomenon and follows people
who are major figures in the subculture of fans.
The inspiration for WE ARE WIZARDS could have been Roger Nygard's
TREKKIES. That film was an examination of many of the various
breeds of Star Trek Fandom. But Nygard's film had a lot more scope
and covered a lot more threads of its movement. This film is more
diffuse and follows three or four Harry Potter rock bands, some
people who maintain fan web sites, a religious zealot who is
convinced that kids reading fantasy stories about wizards will
destroy the fabric of the country, etc. They form a mosaic of the
fandom that has come out of J. K. Rowling's books and people
reacting to it.
One Harry Potter rock group is the Hungarian Horntails. They are
made up of two children: Darius Wilkins, age seven at the time the
film was made; and Holden Wilkins, age four. These two kids seems
to be rock stars in spite of the fact that at this age they can do
little more than scream songs like "Dragon Rock Rules" while Darius
runs his hand over a guitar making sound but not music. The lyrics
for that song seem to be just yelling the title phrase into the
microphones over and over again. It is remarkable that they are
rock stars at such a young age and have a large following, but it
may say more about their fans than it does about them themselves.
Examples of their music can be found at
http://www.myspace.com/thehungarianhorntails.
Another thread has self-appointed religious advocate and cult
expert Caryl Matrisciana warning of the extreme dangers of children
being seduced into the dark world of the occult by Harry Potter.
Matrisciana made an anti-Potter film on what she calls "the dangers
and realities of witchcraft." She does not specify here exactly
what specific dangers she sees, but she seems to imply that
witchcraft really exists and that letting children read the Potter
books gives them over to what she calls "the dark world of
vampires, lizards, serpents,..." Her world is more frightening than
theirs is.
Director Josh Koury shows us other wizard rock bands including
Harry and the Potters which offers not one but two Harry Potters,
on a younger Potter and one an older one. Other groups are Draco
and the Malfoys, and The Whomping Willows. And we meet Heather
Lawver who ran Potter fandom website until Warner Brothers lived up
to their name and threatened fans not to use copyright material,
which is just about everything about Potter. Lawver responded by
organizing an international boycott of Warner Brothers Potter
materials.
There is probably much more material that Koury does not show us
that would be more of interest than some of what he does. For
reasons known best to him he chooses to have us see Darius and
Holden playing like most children do and sometimes arguing in the
backseat of their car. He cannot have been that surprised that the
brothers behave like other children of their age even if they are
rock stars. Why Koury thinks the audience needs to see it is a
mystery. A little Wizard Rock seems to go a long way, and not
unexpectedly did not do a lot for my Puccini-loving ears.
Koury far too much seems to have just let the camera run on his
subjects. There is no story to the film as there is with a
documentary such as HOOP DREAMS. Instead we just see people doing
their thing. And their thing too frequently fails to seem
noteworthy. I came away from the film wanting to tell cult-expert
Caryl Matrisciana that just because these kids say they are wizards
does not mean that there is really anything magical about them.
And I think I would like to tell the kids the same thing. I rate
WE ARE WIZARDS low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 5/10.
Film Credits: http://tinyurl.com/weRwizards
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Product Placement and ROLLBACK (letter of comment by
Robert Sawyer)
In response to Susan de Guardiola's letter about the appearance of
the Atkins Diet in Robert Sawyer's book ROLLBACK in the 10/10/08
issue of the MT VOID, Robert Sawyer writes:
First, Atkins didn't pay me a penny. I've never taken a cent from
anyone to promote anything anywhere.
And I don't know any author who has ever gotten any sort of
product-placement payment, and *especially* not in science fiction.
Do you know why ANALOG and ASIMOV'S have so few pages of ads?
BECAUSE NO ONE WILL BUY THEM, even at $900 (cost of a full page in
one of those magazines).
That is, despite having a full-time ad sales department at Dell
Magazines, they've never been able to convince, even once, any
major advertising account outside of SF book and DVD publishers, to
pony up what is a trivial amount of money by Madison Avenue
standards for FULL PAGE ADS in a science-fiction magazines--and you
have visions of big-bucks checks being cut for SINGLE-SENTENCE
mentions of something that isn't even a product (you don't have to
buy ANYTHING to do Atkins; it doesn't require special foodstuffs
the way, say, Weight Watchers, does)? Puh-leeze.
Second, the word "Atkins" appears exactly four times in the novel
(two of which are adjacent to each other); the brand name
"Scrabble" appears 24 times. And, no, Hasbro didn't pay me a cent,
either. And, by the way, "Coke" and "Pizza Hut" each appear twice,
and no one found this remarkable, so I guess the threshold of
suspicion is somewhere between three and four total mentions (out
of 100,000 words) ... ;)
Third, the last of the four references to Atkins is a negative one:
In reference to what the demonstrably more advanced Dracons eat,
Sarah says, "I'm afraid Atkins didn't catch on beyond Earth; it's
mostly carbohydrates."
Fourth, the choice of Atkins is in service of the theme of the
book, and it's not even subtext; it's spelled out explicitly in
Chapter 7. Atkins demonstrably works -- that is, it takes weight
off, and does so quickly. But if you want to keep the weight off,
you have to stay on Atkins FOR DECADES. It's the SETI of diets:
it is NOT for the impatient, it's NOT something that you can do
without a long-term commitment. You want to talk to the stars?
Sure, banging out a signal, or picking one up, is quick and easy,
but after that it's a lifelong commitment. You want to take weight
off? Easy. You want to KEEP weight off? It's a lifelong
commitment. In the book, Sarah talks the talk, and Don walks the
walk.
Fifth, the fact that Don is slim in his eighties (and also when he
appears to be in his twenties for the second time), but was not
when he was actually young, is also in service of the book's story.
He's not supposed to be a callous, bad guy, you know, and it was
important to show that the notion of a beautiful twenty-something
coming on to him was something he'd never had any experience with
the first time around, and so he was unprepared for and caught off
guard by Lenore's actions. [-rs]
===================================================================
TOPIC: AT&T (letter of comment by Steve Lelchuk)
In response to Mark's comments on AT&T in the 10/10/08 issue of
the MT VOID, Steve Lelchuk writes, "Not to mention the consequences
for AT&T of cooperation in illegal wiretapping (assuming no
retroactive immunity, of course!)." [-sl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Product Placement and the Disney Channel (letter of comment
by Dave Anolick)
In response to Mark's comments on product placement in the
10/10/08 issue of the MT VOID, Dave Anolick writes:
I'm confused by your comment that: "The Walt Disney Company is
considering the possibility of moving the Disney Channel to free
broadcast. ... They make far more money from advertising than they
make from Disney Channel subscriptions. "
Do you mean they are considering moving from basic cable to on the
air free like NBC broadcast from NYC?
Disney went from paid subscription on cable (like HBO/Showtime/etc)
to basic more than 10 years ago. [-da]
Mark responds:
Take what I say here with a grain of salt. I do not know this
business very well. I will give you my interpretation.
When you get basic cable you pay the provider a fixed rate and get
many stations that the cable company gives you as a package they
call "basic service." But I believe some of what they give you as
part of their basic service they have to pay for (like a restaurant
has to pay for the napkins they give you sort of "for free").
Disney is going to a new business model where they are "free-to-
air." I believe that means that they will satellite-broadcast an
unencrypted signal, charging nobody for it assuming they have the
equipment to pick it up. They expect advertising, explicit and
implicit, to foot the bill. [-mrl]
To which Dave answers:
That makes sense to me. I don't understand the business either.
I do remember about ten years ago it was a big deal when they
switched from subscription like HBO/Showtime to basic cable.
And my kids love the Disney Channel, but I never would have paid
for it. [-da]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Product Placement in THE LAST MIMZY (letter of comment by
Frank Leisti)
In response to Taras Wolansky's letter on product placement in THE
LAST MIMZY in the 10/10/08 issue of the MT VOID, Frank Leisti
writes:
I believe that the interesting part was that the corporate name was
present at the microscopic level. I wonder if we will soon be
building a world where everything created will have identification
marks and serial numbers so that any and all parts can be
identified and tracked through all transactions giving a complete
history of the individual parts and the whole.
They currently have manufacturers putting in polymer markers in
explosives, and printers are now getting setup to print on each
page information about the printer--so that if necessary,
government can track who bought the item. [-frl]
And Mark replies, "Now that you mention the placement, I remember
it. Thanks." [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
I recently read a selection of THE ARABIAN NIGHTS (a.k.a. "Kitab
Alf Laylah wa Laylah", a.k.a. "Mille et une Nuits", a.k.a. "The
Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night", a.k.a. "1001 Nights"),
in this case the Barnes & Noble edition (ISBN-13 978-1-59308-281-9,
ISBN-10 1-59308-281-9).
When talking about THE ARABIAN NIGHTS, one is almost obliged to
talk about the various translations. The translation I read was by
H. W. Dulcken (also spelled Dulken) (1863-1865) from Antoine
Galland's French translation (1704-1712). As a sample passage,
consider the beginning of "The History of the First Calender, the
Son of a King":
"That you may know, madam, how I lost my right eye, and the reason
why I have been obliged to take the habit of a calendar, I must
begin by telling you, that I am the son of a King. My father had a
brother, who, like himself, was a monarch, and this brother ruled
over a neighbouring state. He had two children, a son and a
daughter; the former of whom was about my age."
By comparison, Edward William Lane's translation (1840) calls it
"The First Mendicant's Story of the Royal Lovers" and starts:
"Know, O my mistress, that the cause my my having shaved my beard
and of the loss of my eye was this: -- My father was a King, and he
had a bother who was also a King, and resided in another capital.
It happened that my mother gave birth to me on the same day on
which the son of my uncle was born; and years and days passed away
until we attained to manhood."
And Sir Richard Francis Burton's translation (1879-1888) calls the
story "The First Kalandar's Tale" and begins:
"Know, O my lady, that the cause of my beard being shorn and my eye
being out-torn was as follows. My father was a King and he had a
brother who was a King over another city; and it came to pass that
I and my cousin, the son of my paternal uncle, were both born on
one and the same day. And years and days rolled on; and as we grew
up, ..."
Obviously, which one prefers stylistically is a matter of taste,
but the consensus seems to be that Lane "toned down" some of the
scenes, and Dulcken bowdlerized them even further, while Burton
left it all in. On the other hand, Dulcken's translation stressed
readability, which I think one might agree is not a strong point of
the Burton translation. Even Jorge Luis Borges, in his lecture
"The Thousand and One Nights", says that Burton writes "in a
curious English partly derived from the fourteenth century, an
English full of archaisms and neologisms, an English not devoid of
beauty but which at times is difficult to read." (It should be
noted that English, not Spanish, was actually Borges's first
language.)
By the way, Borges confirms Burton's "raciness", saying that he
loved THE ARABIAN NIGHTS when he was young, but, "La obra de
Burton, llena de lo que entonces era considerado obsceno, me estaba
prohibida y tenia que leerla a escondidas en la azotea. Pero en
aquella epoca yo estaba tan entusiasmado con el magico que no
prestaba atencion a las partes censurables." ["Burton"s work, full
of what was then considered obscene, was forbidden to me and I had
to read it secretly on the roof. But at that time I was so
enthusiastic about the magic that I did not pay any attention to
the censurable parts."]
Borges also says, "The Arabs say that no one can read THE THOUSAND
AND ONE NIGHTS to the end." He adds, "Not for reasons of boredom:
one feels the book is infinite," perhaps to head off anyone from
responding, "That's because they are reading the Burton
translation." Borges also provides an example of how one must be
cautious of reading too much into a work from a translation. He
describes the story of the fisherman and the genie as saying that
the fisherman goes down to "a sea" and casts his nets. "Already,"
Borges says, "the expression 'a sea' is magical, placing us in a
world of undefined geography. The fisherman doesn't go down to
*the* sea, he goes down to *a* sea and casts his net." This may be
true in some translations, but Dulcken says, when [the fisherman]
had got to the sea-shore..." No indefinite article here (although
no specific sea is named either). Lane says, "One day he went
forth at the hour of noon to the shore of the sea..." Even Burton
says, One day he went forth about noontide to the sea shore...."
Lane and Burton provided notes; indeed, Lane's notes are now
considered the main "selling point" of his translation. My edition
of Lane has 963 pages of text and 300 pages of notes--and the notes
are in a smaller font than the main text--say 70% story, 30% notes.
Burton's are not collected at the end of the book, but appear with
each story, so the calculation is not as easy, but it appears that
the division is about 80% story, 20% notes. Barnes & Noble
provides no notes from Dulcken, and I don't know if he even
published any.
However, the Barnes & Noble edition does include a lot of
introductory material by Professor Muhsin al-Musawi, a renowned
scholar of Arabic studies. He points out (among other things) that
the tales of Aladdin and Ali Baba are not authentic to the "Kitab
Alf Laylah wa Laylah", having appeared first in Galland's
translation and apparently based on stories narrated to him by a
Syrian, and not found in any written sources. But they are
included, partly because they have traditionally been included, and
partly because they are so enormously popular with readers (and
filmmakers, I might add).
Now if someone would produce an edition combined the readability of
the Dulcken translation with both Lane's and Burton's notes--I
envision a sort of "Arabian Nights Talmud (*)"--that would be
ideal.
(*) The Talmud (for those who don't know) consist of text and
annotations from multiple sources, these annotations being arranged
on the page around the text such that a given source is always in
the same place. So, for example, one might put the text of THE
ARABIAN NIGHTS in the center of three columns on a page, with
Lane's annotations in the left column and Burton's on the right.
[-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Never express yourself more clearly than you think.
-- Niels Bohr