THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
01/09/09 -- Vol. 27, No. 28, Whole Number 1527
El Honcho Grande: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
La Honcha Bonita: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
And Another (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Edd Cartier Has Died (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
RELIGULOUS Online (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The Mouse and I (part 1) (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
If You Read Only One Book in 2009, You Should Read ...
(comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
TWILIGHT (letter of comment by Raven Stern)
This Week's Reading (MICHELANGELO'S NOTEBOOK)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: And Another (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
We seem to have a healthy debate going about TWILIGHT in both book
and film versions. I wonder if we need to title our letter column
"The TWILIGHT Zone."
Actually it is nice to have some controversy going where I am a
non-combatant. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Edd Cartier Has Died (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I see we have lost another link with the Golden Age of science
fiction. Edd Cartier died Christmas Day. While I cannot claim he
was my favorite artist, his art was very commonly seen in the good
days.
If you don't remember him you will probably recognize his style.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edd_Cartier
http://www.webagora.com.br/semillon/ecartier4.htm
http://www.scanraptor.com/hiper/ecartier2.htm
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: RELIGULOUS Online (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Late October I reviewed Bill Mahar's RELIGULOUS. I was asked by
some people about the approach.
Apparently RELIGULOUS is already available online for free
Viewing:
http://tinyurl.com/8z6egz
or
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1839369108234002661
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: The Mouse and I (part 1) (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I live in a Levitt ranch-style house on a street called Lakeridge.
When I was buying the house the name "Lakeridge" did not set off
any alarms in my head. It was like any other street name. I grew
up on Osceola. My wife lived on Jacob. These names mean very
little. They are just people's names. I suppose I thought that
there was somebody named George Lakeridge or something. It did not
occur to me that the name was a warning. My street was named
Lakeridge because it was on a ridge by a lake. Well, even that was
not really honest. I think the ridge has worn away and we are
really on the margin of the lake. Much of the year my backyard is
more marsh than dry land. Before I realized that you have to fight
the humidity we must have been letting it get fairly high. I would
guess it was like 70 or 80%. That made mildew a frequent problem.
The wetness caused all sorts of other problems. I used to claim
that in the spring there were 'gators and tsetse flies in the back.
It is true that, like the House of Usher, my house was doomed to a
terrible fate. The swamp was reclaiming the land by just
swallowing up all the man-things. Occasionally I stretched the
truth just a bit by telling visitors that it used to be a two-story
house and we put in a door when the second floor had sunk to ground
level and the first story was taken back by the Old Gods under the
ground. We had found eight recipes for ichor, which we had not
grown but still could harvest.
The wetness brings all sorts of little creatures. The greatest
number in the house was spiders. The house has lots of spiders.
Getting rid of them is a special problem for me. It isn't bad
enough that we have the invaders; I have to make it worse by
bringing morals into it and also principles. My own belief for
myself is that I have no right to kill for simple convenience or
for hatred. Killing is justified only for self-preservation.
Does this mean that I am a vegetarian? Vegetarians kill plants to
live. That is a form of killing. I think it is worse to kill an
animal than to kill a plant, but I am still OK with killing animals
for food. In very cold climates, not my current climate, they can
be killed for their pelts to prevent hypothermia. But killing for
any motive but self-preservation is wrong. So do I kill ants and
termites? Well, yes, but I don't claim it is moral to do so. I
immorally kill certain animals to protect my food supply. I really
would not think much of someone who lives by all of their
principles. That means they are setting the bar too low. I would
like to be the sort of person whose moral convictions would
actually prevent him from killing ants. I kill ants with my
conscience giving me dirty looks.
But ants are a different kingdom altogether. And ants are the most
warlike animals on Earth. So my conscience is not strong enough to
stop me from killing ants. At least usually the invaders of my
house are arthropods. I suppose I do not get emotionally tied to
them. But on at least three occasions the invaders have been field
mice. Now a field mouse is a mammal like I am. I see in a field
mouse some of my ancestors around the time of the dinosaurs. We
all are just sort of modified rodents the way I see it. The noble
mouse was a lot like my ancestors who raided dinosaur nests and it
ate dinosaur eggs. (Yes, believe it or not I have ancestors going
back that far.) And dinosaurs could do little to stop them because
they were up against something fairly smart. Now there were smart
dinosaurs also, almost certainly, but this sort of rodent fights a
guerilla war. You (assuming you are a dinosaur) cannot guard your
nest 24/7. (Actually in those days it was not 24 but 23 and a
fraction. The Earth has slowed in its spinning. I am not really
sure about the 7.) And the rodent won against dinosaurs and
survived whatever killed most of the dinosaurs off.
Yes, a mouse is cute and furry. But they also can do a great deal
of damage. They contaminate food, leave bodily wastes, and can
chew electrical cords and cables. A mouse is a rodent and a rodent
is a digger. A mouse can dig right through concrete. Then again
they have faces. But making them worse, a mouse is a reasoning
animal. A mouse can be a very smart opponent. A human has the
upper hand, but not by as wide a margin as you might imagine. And
that means that no battle against mice is final. If you do not
kill mice, and even if you do, victories are only temporary. There
is an intelligent being out there trying to outsmart your defenses.
What is more: generations of mice can be thinking about the problem
of how to get around your defenses. With a mouse problem you win
rounds, not games. And living on Lakeridge a mouse problem comes
with the territory.
Next week I will tell you about some of the battles I have had with
mice. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: If You Read Only One Book in 2009, You Should Read ...
(comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Okay, here are the rules:
- You can name at most eight books: one pre-20th-century, one from
the 20th century, one from the 21st century through 2007, and one
from 2008, as well as one runner-up per time period. (You can
include 1900 and 2000 in whichever century you prefer. Well, no,
you can't count 1900 as 21st century. :-) )
- For pre-20th century, the Bible and Shakespeare are excluded.
- You don't necessarily have to name the book you think best, or
greatest, or most important. You should name a book you wish to
call to people's attention.
And my choices:
If you read only one classic book this year, you should read THE
GILDED AGE by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. (Runner-up:
NORTHANGER ABBEY by Jane Austen)
If you read only one 20th century book this year, you should read
Jorge Luis Borges's COLLECTED FICTIONS. Runner-up: Edmund Wilson's
PATRIOTIC GORE.
If you read only one 21st century book this year, you should read
Ted Chiang's STORIES OF YOUR LIFE AND OTHERS. Runner-up: Mark
Haddon's THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME.
If you read only one 2008 book this year, you should read Dan
Ariely's PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL: THE HIDDEN FORCES THAT SHAPE OUR
DECISIONS. (It's psychology, not conspiracy theory.)
Let the recommendations begin! [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: TWILIGHT (letter of comment by Raven Stern)
In response to recent comments on TWILIGHT, college freshman Raven
Stern writes:
The thing I find funny about the reviews of the "Twilight" series
I've read is that the author of the review inevitably goes into the
process expecting good literature, or expecting to be disgusted by
the lack thereof. This amuses me because when *we* (and when I say
we, I mean my age group, those of us who started reading them at
the right age when they first came out and still read them), the
target, read TWILIGHT, good literature is exactly what we *don't*
want.
Now, obviously, there are a lot of very popular books that are very
poorly written (even for adults!), and that's all a lot of these
kids will ever read. But there are also a lot of teens who read
books like TWILIGHT (and other things like it) *because* we read
good literature. When I have three to six hundred pages of reading
almost every day or two, it's incredibly nice to take a break every
now and then and pick up something delightfully trashy. And for a
lot of people my age, TWILIGHT is more relatable (angsty teenager
in love) than the novels we read for class. This doesn't mean we
don't love TOM JONES, it just means variety is nice. And for the
rest? At least they're reading. My sister would rather watch TV
or play video games than pick up a book, but she devoured TWILIGHT,
and as a result will read almost anything with a vampire in it.
Now she's moving on to Anne Rice. My point is simply that
TWILIGHT's lack of sophistication is part of its charm. PRIDE AND
PREJUDICE is one of my favorite novels, right up there with [H. G.
Wells's] THE TIME MACHINE. Loving good literature doesn't make me
value TWILIGHT(for all its trashy gooiness) any less. Sometimes
it's just nice to have a break, and reading something trashy is
still a step up from watching television for hours. [-rs]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Three weeks ago, in the 12/19/08 issue of the MT VOID, I wrote
about COUNTERKNOWLEDGE by Damian Thompson, and in particular his
discussion of pseudo-history. Well, MICHELANGELO'S NOTEBOOK by
Paul Christopher (ISBN-13 978-0-451-41186-0, ISBN-10 0-451-41186-2)
is another example of this proliferation of pseudo-history. The
copyright page of MICHELANGELO'S NOTEBOOK has the usual disclaimer:
"This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are
use fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, business establishments, events, or locales is totally
coincidental. But at the end is an "Author's Note" which says that
certain relationships in the story are "true" and "known". So far
as I can tell, this is not the case, and the "Author's Note", while
having some facts in it, is as fictional as the rest of the book.
(I am avoiding being too specific in case you decide to read the
book, though frankly, the "revelation" is predictable and the book
is not that good.) While I am no great admirer of the person in
question, this claim about what is "true" is really uncalled for.
One would think that a mystery/thriller about missing and stolen
art works would be sufficiently exciting, but ever since THE DA
VINCI CODE, authors have apparently decided that they must include
some long-running conspiracy--preferably involving the Catholic
Church--by a secret society to conceal the truth about something or
other. With a few additions and the right marketing, Michael Flynn
could have a runaway best seller with his 1990 novel IN THE COUNTRY
OF THE BLIND. Interestingly, when I reviewed that book twenty
years ago, I mentioned Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry
Lincoln's HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL (upon which THE DA VINCI CODE was
based) in the review.
But Flynn was honest about his book. He did not pretend in an
author's note that his speculations were actual facts, Christopher
(and others) seem to think that doing so makes their books better,
but it just serves to degrade the public's intelligence. For the
people who believe it, it makes them believe things such as that
there really is a secret society working to maintain Jesus's
bloodline. And for the people who realize that these "Author's
Notes" are as fictional as the rest of the book, it makes them
suspicious of everything they read. This may not seem so bad, but
what it means is that it is impossible to convince them of
anything, because any facts they don't like, they can dismiss as
mere fabrications.
There's apparently a sequel to this (THE AZTEC CONSPIRACY),
exposing some other conspiracy, probably also with an "Author's
Note". With novels this makes some sense, I suppose, but one
wonders why people are not more skeptical of the various claims
made by many "non-fiction" writers. Don't people find it peculiar
that the same person can manage to uncover hidden secrets in so
many diverse areas of history? It's as if in science the same
person who formulated relativity than went on to discover DNA.
(It could be that the Coen Brothers need to take some blame here,
for saying at the beginning of their 1996 film FARGO as "This is a
true story." Certainly many people believed it was.) [-ecl]
[This is more serious than it sounds. One woman died as a result.
See http://tinyurl.com/fargo-death. -mrl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
We do not see the world as it is.
We see the world as we are.
-- The Talmud