THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
02/13/09 -- Vol. 27, No. 33, Whole Number 1532
El Honcho Grande: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
La Honcha Bonita: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Godlogic (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The On-line Film Critic Society Annual Awards (comments by
Mark R. Leeper)
Stealing More Than the Company (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
CORALINE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
THE DECAPITATED CHICKEN AND OTHER STORIES by Horacio Quiroga
(book review by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Second Best Versus Worst (letter of comment by Pete Brady)
This Week's Reading (SHERLOCK HOLMES WAS WRONG, HOLMES
ON THE RANGE, 230 DESPUES DE CRIST) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: Godlogic (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Evelyn saw a sign left over from Christmastime that said "Jesus is
the reason for the season." She asks, does that mean we would not
have snow without Jesus? I said that of course the person who put
up that sign thought so. Here is the logic:
A) Jesus is God.
B) God is Love.
C) Love makes the world go 'round.
D) The world's going round the sun is what makes seasons.
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: The On-line Film Critic Society Annual Awards (comments by
Mark R. Leeper)
January 19 the On-line Film Critic Society gave its awards for the
best of 2008. For what is probably the first time, the majority of
awards went to fantasy films (I indented the non-fantasy films):
PICTURE: WALL-E
DIRECTOR: Christopher Nolan, THE DARK KNIGHT
ACTOR: Mickey Rourke, THE WRESTLER
ACTRESS: Michelle Williams, WENDY AND LUCY
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Heath Ledger, THE DARK KNIGHT
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Marisa Tomei, THE WRESTLER
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: WALL-E, Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon
ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, John Ajvide Lindqvist
DOCUMENTARY: MAN ON WIRE
ANIMATED FEATURE: WALL-E
FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM: LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (Sweden)
CINEMATOGRAPHY: THE DARK KNIGHT, Wally Pfister
ORIGINAL SCORE: THE DARK KNIGHT, James Newton Howard & Hans Zimmer
EDITING: SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, Chris Dickens
BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE: Lina Leandersson, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN
BREAKTHROUGH FILMMAKER: Tomas Alfredson, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN
Who are the OFCS? http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com/pages/about
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Stealing More Than the Company (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
[Written January 30, 2009]
Back in the 07/15/05 issue of the MT VOID, I wrote an editorial
(http://tinyurl.com/stealingcompany) that reflected on lunchtime
conversations I had in the mid-1970s when I was at the beginning of
my career. I had an MA in mathematics and one of my co-workers who
had an MBA was explaining to me how capitalism works. The CEO of
the company we worked for was what seemed at the time to be hard on
the employees, at least by the standards of those days. My
coworker, Steve, was telling me that the CEO does not do what is
best for the employees; he does what is best for the stockholders.
What keeps him honest and in line? Well, he is a major
stockholder. If he damages the stock value he stands to lose a lot
of money himself. Being a stockholder he will do his best to help
the other stockholders. And if a CEO did start to damage the
stockholders, the other executives and the directors of the company
would get rid of him.
Steve had almost as much to learn as I did. In my 2005 article I
pointed out what was a loophole in Steve's reasoning. I had
realized it long before, but I had waited three decades to go
public, and by then it was not much of a secret. The secret was
that while the CEO was feeding at the trough, he just had to let
the various groups that were supposed to be watching him also feed.
By taking the value of the company rather than just the profits
from stock the upper management would make enough that they did not
care if the stock price plummeted. They had their bonuses and if
their stock became worthless they cried all the way to the bank
(and it was a long flight to their bank in the Bahamas).
The people who had the power to do so just kept rewarding each
other for doing such a superior job. And they got richer and
richer even if the corporation was being sucked dry and the stock
was becoming worthless. I dubbed this behavior "stealing the
company." The high executives could fill their pockets without
worrying about the stockholders. I think the strategy was not
really old, but its usage became very common about that time. At
the time I did not hear many other people talking about this form
of malfeasance. That had to wait until more recent months. Right
now corporate greed is starting to make real headlines. People are
starting to sit up and take notice, though that may be all that
they are able to do.
A few weeks back I wrote about how John Thain took over the reins
of a failing Merrill Lynch a year ago, drove it right into the
ground, and then expected a fifty-million-dollar bonus. (See
http://tinyurl.com/thain-decision.) He didn't get it, but he
probably will not miss it all that much. It seems he is back in
the news. He finally has been ejected from Merrill Lynch (or
rather what is left of it), but not before he spent about 1.2
million dollars to decorate his office. This included features
like a $1,405 trashcan, an $87,000 area rug, and a $35,000 "commode
on legs." This was all while Merrill Lynch was failing and was
putting its employees out to pasture in the thousands and thumbing
its nose at stockholders. It should be noted that Merrill Lynch
died with the year 2008. In 2009 Bank of America gathered up what
was left.
But that decoration was only a million dollars or so. In order to
make sure his friends had a Happy New Year he also gave a reported
FOUR BILLION DOLLARS IN BONUSES in executive payouts to the people
who were supposed to be watching him. (Remember what I said about
how it was possible to steal the company right from under
stockholders?) He stole from the stockholders and he stole from
the employees.
Now you might be wondering who was stupid enough to give Thain four
billion dollars to do with what he wanted. Well, I guess I have to
confess. I did that. When I sent in a check for my income tax
last year, I gave the money to Uncle Sam who obligingly passed it
on to Merrill Lynch and to John Thain. Also I lent Uncle Sam more
money to give Thain when I bought some Treasury bills.
I am afraid that my article on executives stealing their companies
suffered from a failure of my imagination. I had assumed that
their reach was only to suck their own companies dry. Thain
figured out how to steal from me and you and your children and your
children's children.
Now what is going on here is that some of the most successful
people in this country have bought into the theory that they have a
sort of Divine Right to huge incomes and all of the best life has
to offer. They figure they are successful so they must be smarter
than other people and have worked harder than other people and
nobody can question they deserve a high-reward lifestyle. It leads
to the kind of thinking, "Congress is offering money to bail out
companies in financial trouble. I want a piece of that money. I
have to go talk to Congress. Jimmy, fire up my private jet. Let's
take the dark blue one."
The bailouts may be a necessary evil, but the money has to be
carefully guarded so that it does not end up in the pockets of
thieves. We have gone through eight years in which all the
regulators at the top of the economy have been advocates of de-
regulation. It would be nice to believe that the regulation was
not necessary. But we have to understand a lot of corporate people
who hold in their hands the fate of the economy and our lives and
lives all around the world are from the "Greed is Good" school of
economic philosophy. They have to be carefully watched and
regulated, even if watching them is going to be expensive.
Postscript:
On "Meet The Press" on February 1, Erin Burnett defended the
bonuses, saying "The taxpayer money isn't being taken and paid out
in the form of bonuses. It goes in a separate pool ... a separate
account for banks." In other words the money the government was
paying out did not go into the fund from which the FOUR BILLION
DOLLARS IN BONUSES came from. Some defense. That simply means
that the accounting at Merrill Lynch had been set up so the
executives got their cut, to the tune of FOUR BILLION DOLLARS IN
BONUSES off the top of the stack, regardless of what else was
happening in the company.
A discussion of the above can be found at
http://mediamatters.org/items/200902020020?f=h_latest. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: CORALINE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: With charming images in 3-D animation we have the story of
a girl who finds a tunnel to a parallel world where she has two
"other" parents who just love her to death. Everything is wondrous
in this world until she finds out that ... but that would be
telling. This is based on a story by the incomparable fantasy
author Neil Gaiman. Somewhere between Gaiman's writing and the
rendering on the screen written and directed by Henry Selick, this
film loses coherence with too little happening that makes sense.
Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4) or 7/10
One thinks of fantasy as a genre in which anything can happen.
Though it seems paradoxical to say it, this means that fantasy is
very highly dependent on fixed, even if arbitrary, rules. The
viewer has to know what the ground rules are. In DRACULA we know
what kills vampires. If at the end Dracula gets up and we find
that a stake through the heart really does not work, we would feel
cheated. Suppose Frodo threw the ring into the fires and it turned
into a dragon that kills him, and Sauron is as powerful as ever.
What would be the point of the story? ALICE IN WONDERLAND is fun
whimsy, but one never really empathizes with Alice. The real world
does not have to make sense, but a fantasy really world does if the
viewer/reader is going to buy into the plot. If anything can
happen there is no point to the hero's striving.
Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) is a pert young girl who moves
with her family into a strange house with some stranger tenants.
There is an odd Russian (Ian McShane) in the third floor who is
doing something unexplained with mice. There are two sisters who
live in the basement. These people are all weird eccentrics. But
when Coraline gets frustrated with her parents' lack of attention
to her, she focuses her attention on a strange little locked door
in the wall. After some effort she opens this unused door and find
it leads to a mysterious tunnel into the head of John Malkovich.
No, I am getting my movies confused. At the end of the tunnel is a
house identical to hers with a mother and a father who look like
her parents but they have buttons instead of eyes. It seems
everybody in this world has buttons for eyes. These parents are
just like Coraline's own parents, but they love her more. Where
here the food her parents serve is something of a dog's breakfast,
her "other" parents serve her delicious food, much of which seems
chosen to be the short route to the diabetes ward. The Button
World parents just love Coraline so much that they cannot bear to
let her leave. So they may not. And why should Coraline want to
go home to parents who are so indifferent and oblivious to her
presence?
Neil Gaiman is fast becoming to the fantasy film with Philip
K. Dick is to the science fiction film. His CORALINE in the film
version is a story in dire need of just a few ground rules to make
sense of what we are seeing on the screen. It is an interesting
fantasy film done in a visual style reminiscent of Tim Burton
animation. And the film's stop-motion animation is even more
impressive in 3-D. But at a certain point it is just not clear
what is happening and how the characters' problems have to be
fixed. There are questions such as, who has multiple
manifestations and why do not other characters? What does it
signify that when Coraline collects certain artifacts, that the
world around them suddenly seems to turn gray? Nor do we really
know when the story is over. What makes this particularly puzzling
is that the story is by Neil Gaiman, who usually is a master of the
fantasy art form. I have not read the book, but my suspicion is
that it would make a lot more sense. Henry Selick's previous
fantasies, JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH and THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE
CHRISTMAS, are good-looking films, but may not be completely
engaging fantasies. Reportedly Selick makes some major revisions
to the story adding a major character, Wybie, who is not in the
book. And Coraline can slip between the worlds in ways she could
not in the book. Perhaps my problems with CORALINE were just me
being dense, but too often I was not sure what was happening and
why.
Our second button fantasy of the season is visually lush and the
stop-motion works as well as the emotional core of the film. But
even so good an effort in so many different ways fails if the
viewer is left confused by scenes that should be better explained.
I rate CORALINE a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10. For those
who sit through the credits there is a reward of a tour de force
scene of 3-D that has nothing to do with the plot but is still nice
to see. In fact it is worth some extra effort to see this film in
3-D.
Film Credits: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0327597/
What others are saying: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/coraline/
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: THE DECAPITATED CHICKEN AND OTHER STORIES by Horacio Quiroga
(translated by Margaret Sayers Peden) (ISBN-13 978-0-299-19834-3,
ISBN-10 0-299-19834-0) (book review by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Last week I mentioned in my review of Leopoldo Lugones's STRANGE
FORCES that the back blurb for it compares Lugones with Edgar Allan
Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Horacio Quiroga. Quiroga in turn has
been described as an early 20th century Uruguayan surrealist,
though he was the son of the Argentinian consul to Uruguay and
actually spent most of his life in Argentina. His pre-occupation
with death is undoubtedly the result of the tragedies of his life:
his father was accidentally killed in a shotgun accident, his
stepfather shot himself, in his early twenties Quiroga himself
accidentally shot and killed his best friend, and Quiroga's first
wife committed suicide. Quiroga himself committed suicide when he
learned he had cancer.
Quiroga is not much anthologized in English. Alberto Manguel
included Quiroga's story "The Feather Pillow" in his ground-
breaking anthology BLACK WATER, and that story has been reprinted
twice more (by Richard Dalby in DRACULA'S BROOD and in one of those
Barnes & Noble "100 {adjective} Little {alliterative adjective}
Stories" volumes. Another, "The Dead Man" appears in A HAMMOCK
BENEATH THE MANGOES edited by Margaret Sayers Peden. However, in
1976 the University of Texas Press did publish THE DECAPITATED
CHICKEN AND OTHER STORIES (ISBN-10 0-292-77514-8), translated by
Margaret Sayers Peden.
Before I located a copy of that collection through inter-library
loan, I could find "The Dead Man" only in its original Spanish ("El
hombre muerto") in one of my father's textbooks, an anthology of
Hispanic literature. I also read "La gallina degollada" ("The
Decapitated Chicken") from that textbook, heavy on style, but
predictable and bearing a marked resemblance to what must be a
centuries-old urban legend that I heard in an old version in
Scotland and have heard updated in the United States since then.
But one suspects the story was less predictable and more surprising
in 1909 when Quiroga wrote it.
THE DECAPITATED CHICKEN AND OTHER STORIES includes a dozen of
Quiroga's best-known stories (along with pen and ink illustrations
by Ed Lindlof), in chronological order. So it starts not with the
title story, but with "The Feather Pillow" (1907). "The Feather
Pillow" is a very short story (less than 1500 words) which works by
building an atmosphere and then hitting the reader with the perfect
final line.
Most of the stories have no fantastic content. "Sunstroke" (1908),
"Drifting" (1912), "A Slap in the Face" (1916), and "In the Middle
of the Night" (1919) are "stories of place"--stories that are about
the atmosphere and feel of a particular geographical place and the
people who inhabit it.
"The Pursued" (1908) has an important character named Lugones--one
assumes this is an homage. It is a tale of paranoia, but somehow
did not work for me.
"The Decapitated Chicken" (1909) I commented on above.
"Juan Darien" (1920) is definitely a fantasy story: a tiger cub
adopted by a woman turns into a human boy, although still retaining
some of his feline nature. I am a bit confused, though, about
whether Quiroga talked about a tiger or not, since the story seems
to take place in Argentina, and I did not think they had any tigers
there.
"The Dead Man" (1920) is one of Quiroga's best-known story, but
while people often claim some sort of fantastical content in the
apparent stretching of time, I get the impression that is more a
psychological trick than any sort of relativistic effect.
"Anaconda" (1921) is the longest story in the book. It is
definitely the most Kiplingesque story, seemingly straight from THE
JUNGLE BOOK, with only the names changed. In Quiroga, the various
reptiles are named for their species, e.g., Nacanina. (That is
also, by the way, one of the only forty-one words starting with the
letter "enye" in my 1500-page Spanish dictionary, almost all of
which are South American or African in origin.)
I noted last week that Leopoldo Lugones's "Yzur" has a translation
problem, in that in Spanish there is only one word "mono" meaning
both "monkey" (tailed) and "ape" (not tailed). Well, in "Anaconda"
there seems to be the reverse problem, where a distinction in the
English translation is made between "snake" and "viper"--vipers are
apparently not included in snakes. But I'm not sure if "serpiente"
and "culebra" exclude "vibora"--or even if those are the words
used, since I can't find the original Spanish.
I love Quiroga's turn of phrase in calling Coatiarita "the Benjamin
of the Family". (This is one reason why people unfamiliar with the
Western Canon cannot appreciate everything they do read.)
At times, Quiroga seems very current. One of his books was
ANACONDA, described by one person as "stories about the fierce
battle between reptiles and poisonous vipers." One wonders if the
Sci-Fi Channel has discovered Quiroga as a source of movie ideas.
"The Incense Tree Roof" (1922) is a somewhat Kafka-esque story
about bureaucracy, as well as about the jungle. And "The Son"
(1935) is another non-fantasy piece, albeit with intimations of
omens--but obviously the story most influenced by Quiroga's own
past. [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Second Best Versus Worst (letter of comment by Pete Brady)
In response to a comment in Mark's review of FROST/NIXON in the
02/06/09 issue of the MT VOID, Pete Brady writes:
You wrote, as part of your FROST/NIXON review, "There is an old
question of which would the best swordsman in France more fear to
fight, the second best swordsman or the worst swordsman. The
answer is that he would much more fear the latter since the worst
swordsman would be unpredictable."
You brought back a somewhat painful memory. In ancient times
(early 1960s), when I worked at Murray Hill Bell Labs, there were
several bridge players who formed into duplicate teams of four,
that played during a few lunch hours a week. I was on one of those
teams. I took the game seriously, but I wasn't really good at it,
and the rest on our team may have been a little better, but as a
team, we kept ending up in the middle of the twenty teams that
played.
One of the teams was headed by someone named [Joe Smith], a person
I had no other contact with and have long since lost track of.
Everyone dreaded playing against his team. The players weren't
especially good, but they were erratic. *Very* erratic. They
would make bad bids, plays that went against all odds, and in a
given noon hour, they would usually end up scoring brilliantly high
or resoundingly low. I remember one season in which [Smith]'s team
trounced the top-ranking team in one noon-hour session. Our own
team did moderately well with them, but we got wiped out in one
hand which led me on the way toward giving up the game. I won't go
into details, except to say that they made a very bad bid, which
led me to assume that the distribution of cards was exactly the
opposite of what it was. Some might call this a brilliant move on
their part, but it was not. It was simply a bad bid made from lack
of skill.
At the end of the season, [Smith]'s team ended up right about where
We were--in the middle of the ranking.
FROST/NIXON is on my list of "must sees." [-ptb]
Mark responds, "I wonder what would happen if other teams
intentionally forgot what they knew and just tried to be
unpredictable. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
I picked up SHERLOCK HOLMES WAS WRONG: REOPENING THE CASE OF THE
HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES by Pierre Bayard (translated by Charlotte
Mandell) (ISBN-13 978-1-59691-605-0, ISBN-10 978-1-59691-605-2) at
the library. More fool I--I hadn't noticed that this was by the
author of HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN'T READ, about which I
said, "My recommendation is to make this self-referential. The
writing style seems aimed more at academics than at a popular
audience, and at times seems quite divorced from the book's topic.
Why, for example, does Bayard spend ten pages in this 185-page book
describing the plot of GROUNDHOG DAY?"
Well, that applies to this book (except for the term "self-
referential"). Bayard spends twenty-seven pages out of a hundred
eighty-eight recounting the plot of THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES
in detail. And the writing style has the same problem: "The
subjective incompleteness of the world in the work encourages us to
suppose that there exists around each work, produced by the limited
nature of statements and the impossibility of increasing the
quantity of available information, a whole *intermediate world*--
part of which is conscious and another part unconscious--that the
reader develops by inferences so that the work, completed, can
attain autonomy: a different world, a space with its own laws, more
fluid and more personal than the text itself. but indispensable if
the text is to achieve, in the limitless series of its encounters
with the reader, a minimal coherence." (page 67)
I'm all for achieving a minimal coherence--I just don't think
Bayard manages it.
[This sounds like an academic book trying to look like it was
saying something impressive. -mrl]
And speaking of Sherlock Holmes, I also read HOLMES ON THE RANGE by
Steve Hockensmith (ISBN-13 978-0-312-34780-2, ISBN-10 0-312-34780-
4). This is a combination mystery-Western, but it does not have
Sherlock Holmes in it. Rather, it has a cowboy who has read and
become fascinated by Sherlock Holmes, and then finds himself in a
real-life mystery on the ranch where he is working. The Watson
character (narrator-cum-assistant) is his brother. I thought this
was fairly well done, except for the gimmick that some of the
characters in the book turn out to be related to characters in one
of the Holmes stories. This "making Holmes real" gimmick rather
than just letting a cowboy like Old Red be inspired by fictional
stories may have seemed necessary to Hockensmith. And I realize
that any Holmes pastiche that includes Sherlock Holmes himself does
this of necessity. But somehow when the story is about someone
inspired by the stories, the necessity of maintaining the "reality"
of Holmes seems weaker and more contrived--at least to me.
I also came across a book of cartoons by Cristobal Reinoso, 230
DESPUES DE CRIST (Planeta, 1974, no ISBN). "Cristo" is an
Argentinian (I think) cartoonist whose cartoons often have a
science fictional content. Some are funny, but some I don't get.
I thought it was a cultural problem, but someone mentioned that the
editor of the "New Yorker" cartoons said that for many cartoons,
they get lots of letters from people who either don't get them at
all, or don't think they are funny.
And some of Cristo's cartoons are puns that are funny but really
don't translate well. E.g, an interpreter is translating from a
Plains Indian chief to a U.S. Army officer, "He says he is not
interested in peace ('la paz') because Bolivia is very far away."
Well, I laughed out loud. [-ecl]
[Leeper's Law of Jokes: Any joke that has to be explained to
someone will never be funny to that person. -mrl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
There are more fools than knaves in the world,
else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.
-- Samuel Butler