THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
05/15/09 -- Vol. 27, No. 46, Whole Number 1545
El Honcho Grande: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
La Honcha Bonita: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
In Case You Were Wondering (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Optical Illusion (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The Liberal Tug (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
STAR TREK (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
UNDER OUR SKIN (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
Reflected Moonlight (letter of comment
by Victoria Fineberg)
This Week's Reading (THE ELEPHANT AND THE TIGER and
ALL THE WONDERS WE SEEK) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: In Case You Were Wondering (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Paleontogeny recapitulates paleophylogeny. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Optical Illusion (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
http://www.moillusions.com/2009/05/secret-of-curve-ball.html
This is not a joke. Go to the link, find the frame with the
falling ball, and follow the instructions in the frame. This is a
very convincing optical illusion. It really felt like I could
control where the falling ball lands by where I am looking in the
frame. Of course, it always lands in the same place. Thanks to
Evelyn for showing this to me. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: The Liberal Tug (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Supreme Court Justice David Souter is stepping down from the bench
soon and the President will choose a justice to replace him.
Souter was named to the Court in 1990 by then President George
H. W. Bush. Bush termed the nomination of Souter as a
"Conservative Home Run." Indeed, it has been suggested that this
nomination was made as a consolation prize to the conservatives to
whom Bush had promised no new taxes and then broke his word.
However, Souter proved to be one of those justices who turn out to
be more liberal than expected on the Supreme Court. In fact,
Souter seems to have waited to have a liberal President in office
before he retired so that he is more likely to have a liberal
successor.
This is not the first time that a Supreme Court justice had proven
to be more liberal than expected. Earl Warren was appointed by
Dwight Eisenhower but voted strongly in favor of civil rights, for
separation of religion and government, and against racial
segregation. I remember when I was young there were billboards in
the South recommending that Earl Warren be impeached for turning
liberal on the bench. But somehow I can imagine that in the
position he might feel mandating a progressive civil rights policy
might be a good use of his power. I could be wrong, but I know of
few cases where justices have proven more conservative than
expected. The tug seems to be to the left. Felix Frankfurter and
Byron White seemed to move to the right on the bench. But Harry
Blackmun, appointed by Richard Nixon, wrote the Roe v. Wade
decision. Nixon also appointed Lewis Powell who gave major support
to affirmative action. John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, and
Anthony Kennedy all swung to the left and were all Republican
nominees who became more liberal on the bench.
Why would sitting on the Supreme Court turn conservatives into
progressives? Only a Supreme Court justice knows for sure and many
of them may not know. But I am trying to picture what it is like to
be a newly appointed justice sitting there in my robes on the
bench. I am picturing myself thinking, "Here I am on the Supreme
Court. I am really proud of my accomplishment. And I do not need
to worry about re-election. I have this seat as long as I want it.
Now I have real power. And I want to use it rightly. I want to do
something for my country. I want to leave a legacy for the
American people." But what is his next thought? Somehow I do not
believe it is "What I would really want to do is make handguns
cheap and readily available." Or, "I want to protect the income of
the heads of big corporations."
Maybe it is because I personally grew up in a mostly liberal
environment, but I would have a hard time imagining a justice
thinking like that. I would much more likely think to myself, "I
want to improve working conditions of laborers." "I want to make
sure that people can afford to get good healthcare." "I want to
reform the prison system." These seem to be more liberal goals.
I guess I think there is something about being on the Supreme Court
that makes people think in terms of repairing or improving society
and making people's lives better, and helping people I think of as
a liberal ideal. I am a centrist more than a liberal, but it seems
to me the liberal ideal is to help a broad range of people and the
conservative ideal is to make sure people can protect what is
theirs. That seems much darker and more pessimistic an ideal. It
is an important goal in its own way, but it hardly seems "noble."
It may be a failure of my imagination, but I am not sure what would
be a lofty conservative goal.
Souter himself said after he was sworn in, "The first lesson,
simple as it is, is that whatever court we're in, whatever we are
doing, at the end of our task some human being is going to be
affected. Some human life is going to be changed by what we do.
And so we had better use every power of our minds and our hearts
and our beings to get those rulings right." Is it just me or does
that sound to you like a liberal sentiment? It is hard for me to
picture a Supreme Court Justice thinking about the power he has and
not feel a natural tug of liberalism. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: STAR TREK (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: The new film STAR TREK (the title is just the two words)
is J. J. Abrams's restart of the "Star Trek" series. While nobody
is going to give it any awards for great new ideas, it does tell a
good action-filled adventure story and makes a prequel and origin
to the original TV series that is almost consistent. The viewer
does see and hear the 1966 characters in their younger
incarnations--no small feat for the filmmakers. One almost wants
to go back and watch the original series to see what happens next.
Rating: +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10
Film series generally work by formulae that please the public. But
eventually a formula becomes too predictable and the series
audience slowly slips away. Sometimes the storytellers decide to
just make the series more extreme. This strategy reeks of
desperation and is called "jumping the shark." But by rethinking
the characters and situations and perhaps putting in a little more
intelligent writing, a series can be revived. Batman and James
Bond films have each gone through relatively recent rethinking.
Now that the "Star Trek" TV and movies have died out, the producers
have decided that the series needs a re-fit for the new generation
just as the Starship Enterprise itself periodically did. To
captain the new "Star Trek" we have J. J. Abrams, the creator of
TV's "Lost" and "Alias", who was chosen for the director's seat.
He has given us the best of the "Star Trek" films and brought the
old series to a new generation.
The idea of Abrams's film is to do an origin story. That gives new
details about the characters to old fans and old details to new
fans. The series started in 1966 with some characters on the
bridge and running what was to be the most famous spaceship in
future history, the Starship Enterprise. Now Abrams with the help
of writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman tells the story of how
those characters got to be on that starship. Nearly everybody
seems to have come from the same class at Starfleet Academy. That
class was entertained the friction between two of its members, both
misfit rebels (how original!), both bright, but otherwise very
different. One was the undisciplined James T. Kirk (played by
Chris Pine) and the other was a priggish half-human-half-alien
named Spock (Zachary Quinto). For the film they have brought on
board the newly-launched Enterprise pretty much the whole gang
including Chekov (Anton Yelchin) who did not appear in the first
season.
The film also has its own nasty, a Romulan named Nero (Eric Bana).
Those Romulans not only took the name of their planet from Ancient
Rome (on Earth), they seem to have taken their personal names from
Roman history.
The story has two main requirements. It has to tell a good story,
at which it is fairly successful. It also has to be consistent
with the existing "Star Trek" mythology. (George Lucas had similar
constraints with STAR WARS: EPISODE III--REVENGE OF THE SITH.) I
would guess that at some point in the writing the script was doing
both successfully. But for various reasons the jigsaw puzzle piece
that was crafted did not quite fit. So the script copped out and
said that this is not the world we knew from TV. This is an
alternate history created by circumstances of the story and things
may not work out the same way. That does add a little dramatic
tension, suggesting that characters who lived in the TV universe
might die in this one. There are some revisions to Kirk's
background. In this world he did not get to meet his father. Nor,
mercifully, did he get a commendation for cheating in the Kobayashi
Maru academy test as STAR TREK II suggested. There are other
differences in the two worlds.
The characters seem a little better fleshed out in this film than
in previous "Star Trek" films. And the acting is good both to the
characters and to provide continuity. One can almost hear the
original characters' voices in the new mouths. Kirk even looks and
sounds a little like the original, and so does Spock and McCoy
(Karl Urban). One the other hand Uhura (Zoe Saldana) did not sound
a lot like Nichelle Nichols. The one bad apple is Simon Pegg as
Scotty. He really overdoes the Scottish accent as if he is playing
less to "Star Trek" fans and more to Simon Pegg fans.
The film has the usual dubious pseudo-science invented for the
story. In this universe there is some as yet undiscovered type of
matter dubbed "red matter." Red matter must have something to do
with trans-dimensional physics. It is light and portable, but if
released it gets mass from somewhere unexplained and generates a
black hole. This is used as the villains' weapon. They drill
deeply into planets and create black holes inside with rather nasty
consequences. It was unclear to me why a black hole simply dropped
on the surface of a planet would be any less dangerous than one in
the planet's interior. And dropping on the surface of the planet
would have made for a lot less work. Another problem is that while
the series was never very consistent on the shape of Spock's
pointed ears, at least they never made that obvious. In this film
we see Spock at two different ages and the ears look entirely
different. Quinto's nose seemed built up a little also to match
Leonard Nimoy's nose better. (Quinto should be grateful that Karl
Malden wasn't the original Spock.)
A new fan of the series--and there are more that I would have
expected--can enjoy STAR TREK, but a veteran "Trek" devotee will
get a lot more out of it. Now that I have seen Abram's STAR TREK,
I almost feel like I want to go back and watch "Star Trek" the
original series. I rate the new movie a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale
or 7/10.
Film Credits: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0796366/
What others are saying:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_trek_11/
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: UNDER OUR SKIN (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Writer and director Andy Abrahams Wilson looks at the
spread of and effects of Lyme Disease in the United States. He
examines the controversy of whether chronic Lyme Disease actually
exists and looks at the financial and political interests aligned
in not recognizing the disease. We meet some of the sufferers and
the doctors who risk their careers to treat the disease. The film
is certainly not unbiased, but allows those who do not believe in
the disease to give their reasons. Rating: low +2 (-4 to +4) or
7/10
As recounted in UNDER OUR SKIN, Lyme Disease is a bacterial
infection that can result from the bite of a deer tick. Ticks are
a reservoir for a spiral-shaped bacteria called Borrelia. In its
early stages it can cause rashes, joint problems, and symptoms like
influenza. In most cases antibiotics can cure the disease in a
matter of weeks. But cases of the disease have spread across the
continental United States, with some cases in all states with the
exception of Hawaii. Making matters worse, there may be a much
longer-term chronic Lyme Disease. Whether chronic Lyme exists or
not and what are its symptoms is the subject of intense
disagreement. That controversy is the topic of
director/writer/producer Andy Abrahams Wilson's documentary UNDER
OUR SKIN. The case for the existence of chronic Lyme Disease seems
a strong one, based on this documentary, but this review will not
take sides.
In many (alleged?) cases chronic Lyme Disease is painful and
debilitating. Frequently it is associated with fever, extreme
joint pain, muscle pain, headaches, and stiff neck. Complicating
the matter is the fact that diagnostic tests have very poor
accuracy--around 50%. The infection rate is growing and
widespread. But the medical community claims that there is not
enough evidence. The film examines this controversy and many of
its aspects. Wilson makes a case that the insurance industry is
fighting the recognition of chronic Lyme for what are claimed to be
medical reasons but which are also very strong financial reasons.
If chronic Lyme is accepted as a serious disease, insurance
companies will be obliged to carry the financial burden of
treatments. The insurance companies are interlocked with the
medical community that has a hard time finding evidence of the
disease and is denying what evidence is available. Symptoms
claimed to be arising from chronic Lyme are being attributed to
other causes including psychosomatic problems.
It is hard to deny that the people who believe they are victims of
this disease are suffering, and the cause appears to be chronic
Lyme. The film tells us the story of six victims of the disease.
Doctors are treating patients do seem to be getting positive
results. However, these doctors also face losing their license to
practice and also face very large lawsuits. One such doctor is
Dr. Charles Ray Jones, who has treated 10,000 children for Lyme
Disease. He was charged by the Connecticut State Medical Board
with unprofessional conduct. A legal defense fund funded in large
part by his patients was established to pay his legal fees.
Some issues probably should have at least been mentioned. If Lyme
Disease is distributed across the country, it must be fairly common
in Canada also. If Canadian doctors accept the chronic form
exists, that would be a powerful endorsement for the filmmakers'
point of view. If they themselves doubt that the chronic form
exists, they do so for medical rather than monetary reasons. Dr.
Jones's treatments appear to be effective, but to what extent does
that prove his diagnosis? One cure can work for many different
causes.
This is a good science documentary about a problem that does not
get much press. It even manages to have a hopeful ending rooted in
recent discoveries about Lyme Disease. This film raises disturbing
questions--not just those related to the disease itself but also
broader questions of the conflicts of interest across the insurance
and medical community. These issues need to be understood and
possibly remedied. I rate UNDER OUR SKIN a low +2 on the -4 to +4
scale or 7/10.
Film Credits: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1202579/
What others are saying:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/under_our_skin/
[-mrl]
Response from Andy Abrahams Wilson, director of UNDER OUR SKIN:
Thanks for the review. We could just scratch the surface of LD as a
global problem in UNDER OUR SKIN. But, since the disease was
discovered here and the most established researchers are here, it
makes sense to look at LD in the US as fulcrum and microcosm. Of
course it's absurd that ticks would honor national boundaries. But
that's what the CDC would have us believe. Unfortunately, the map
we show in the film is the only "official" map of LD prevalence.
Partly because of the CDC's prevalence numbers and IDSA's
guidelines, Canadian physicians and officials do not recognize LD
as a significant problem. Most LD patients, if they are diagnosed
at all in the Canadian system, have to travel to the US for
treatment with Lyme-literate physicians. This is a global problem.
Different countries have varying responses to the crisis, but the
IDSA and CDC have significant sway globally. "Healthcare for all"
is obviously not a truth or a panacea. For info about Lyme disease
in Canada (which is said to have among the poorest reporting in the
world), visit: http://www.canlyme.org.
You start asking obvious questions about this disease and you end
up five years later down a dark rabbit hole, with a movie and-
yes--a point of view. [-aaw]
==================================================================
TOPIC: A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Chris Marker's epic four-hour history of the New Left from
1967 to its fall in 1977 has rarely been seen in the United States
until now. Cut to three hours, it may still feel ponderous and
obscure to some. As mostly a hodge-podge of roughly edited
footage, it recreates the feel of the period, but in the end its
obscurity undercuts its power. Tracking the leftist movement from
the exuberance of the late 1960s to dissolution of the movement in
the late 1970s this is a huge project that feels like it veered off
course. It probably works much better in France than in front of
an international audience. Rating: low +1 (-4 to +4) or 5/10
One type of film that the French do better than anyone else is the
epic-length documentary. Marcel Ophüls's THE SORROW AND THE PITY
and Claude Lanzmann's SHOAH have been shown in the United States to
deserved acclaim. In my opinion the only epic documentary from the
United States that stands with these films is Ken Burns's THE CIVIL
WAR. One major French documentary that has never gotten much of a
release here was Chris Marker's A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT. To be honest
I had not even heard of this film until a few weeks before its
scheduled DVD release in the United States in May 2009, though it
had a low-key release in 2002. The film was originally 240 minutes
in 1977 and was cut to 177 minutes for a European rerelease in
1993. Why the film has been so rarely seen in this country is not
hard to guess.
The name Chris Marker may sound familiar, by the way. He wrote and
directed a 28-minute film "La Jetée." Terry Gilliam remade the
film, enlarging on the ideas, for his TWELVE MONKEYS.
Here is a test to see for yourself if this documentary is for you.
Suppose you were to see a film clip of a young Jacques Delors.
Would you know who that was? Would you recognize him? Would you
know that he was later to become a major figure in the French Parti
Socialiste? Would you enjoy hearing him or someone like him
discuss dialectic in French accompanied by frequently difficult to
read subtitles? No doubt there are some who will answer with "no"
and some who can answer with "yes". I freely admit I am in the
"no" camp. Perhaps greater numbers of French would be in the "yes"
group. Still, Marcel Ophüls and Claude Lanzmann made their
documentaries accessible with little presumed preparation. Chris
Marker did not. Marker will have someone lecturing in French and
intercut a picture of what looks like a raccoon. It appears a
complete non sequitur. Meanwhile the person talking usually is not
given any identification and his speech is not very clearly
translated into English. At times even the subtitles are hard to
read.
Marker begins with the Odessa Steps scene of Serge Eisenstein's
BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, intercutting it with nearly identical scenes
taken from then current news footage. Marker's study of the New
Left starts in 1967 with protests of the Vietnam War. Then early
on there is a disturbing sequence of an American flyer taking great
pleasure from the sport of dropping napalm on Viet Cong on the
ground and watching them scatter. "We saw people running every
which way ... I really like to do that." Intercut we see footage
of people burned by napalm and get a better feel of why they do run
every which way. So far the narrative is fairly clear, but it does
not remain that way. Soon it will be littered with long speeches
with obscure references. Someone will just start talking about the
Grenelle Report without any explanation of what it is or what its
importance is. Presumably it is more meaningful in France.
Marker will give us footage of Fidel Castro making a speech about
policy. It will not be clear how it fits in. But Castro's style
is to speak with long pauses between sentences to collect his
thoughts. Marker needed to do something to edit out the pauses,
but instead the viewer sits and waits. There is a lot of footage
of crowds protesting. The camera will pick someone out of the
crowd and focus on him. Is he someone important or just supposed
to represent a typical member of the crowd? We never know. Again,
this might be a very different film in France.
The film is divided in two parts. The first part titled "Fragile
Hands" chronicles the Vietnam War and the protests it generated in
the United States and also in Europe. The title is a reference to
a quote that the workers will takes the revolution from the
"fragile hands" of the students. As I remember that period, most
of the workers wanted to part of the protest or the protesters.
Norman Lear was more accurate when he personified the typical
worker as Archie Bunker. The second part, entitled "Severed
Hands", is more downbeat and starts with the schisms in the left
brought about by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. It
covers the leftist movement in France, Japan, Venezuela, Cuba, the
United States, China, Chile, West Germany, Northern Ireland,
Mexico, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and South Africa. It
ends with Chile and the bringing down of reformer Salvador Allende.
While the footage cobbled together gives a feel for the excitement
and disappointment of the times, the editing seems rough and the
sound is often muddy. This feels almost like a rough cut rather
than a film that has been re-edited more than once, but the
crudeness is probably intentional to give the film tone. Still
this film seems more like a pile of scenes than an edifying
history. Some of the electronic music used sounds like something
from a Dario Argento film.
To get full value from A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT, it would be necessary
to watch it taking notes on what is not familiar. Then one would
have to research those topics--Wikipedia is probably fine. Then
watch the film a second time. And no doubt there will be more to
look up. That is not saying that it is a bad documentary, by any
means, but it is made for a different audience than the film will
likely find in the United States. This is a long documentary that
recreates feel of exciting times but does not explain those times
as clearly as an Ophüls film would. I rate A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT a
low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 5/10. The title of the film is
obviously a reference to the Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll's
ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, but the meaning remains unclear.
The French title of the film, LE FOND DE L'AIR EST ROUGE, means
"the bottom of the air is red." If anything, that makes less
sense.
The DVD is being released on DVD on May 14 from Icarus Films. It
comes with a 16-page booklet which includes essays by Chris Marker
and film critic Phil Hall.
Film Credits: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0076042/
What others are saying:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/grin_without_a_cat/
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Reflected Moonlight (letter of comment by Victoria
Fineberg)
In response to Tom Russell's comment about those objecting to the
claim that the moon has no light of its own but only reflects
sunlight ("Lunatics?") in the 05/08/09 issue of the MT VOID,
Victoria Fineberg writes, "Excess moonshine?" [-vf]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
I recently listened to the audio book of THE ELEPHANT AND THE
TIGER: THE RISE OF INDIA AND CHINA, AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR ALL OF US
by Robyn Meredith (read by Laural Merlington) (ISBN-13
978-1-4001-0485-7, ISBN-10 1-4001-0485-8). I have two sets of
comments, one on the actual book, and one on the audiobook
experience.
The book is about the rise of India and China as economic super-
powers. Or rather, it is about the return, since Meredith claims
that both countries had been super-powers for most of the last
thousand years, and their "decline" in the 20th century was just a
blip. The chapters seem to alternate between China and India, and
the two seem very much like the hare and the tortoise, with China
leaping ahead rapidly, while India is taking a slower path which
may yet make it the ultimate leader. Both countries have achieved
massive gains in part because they insisted companies set up
research and development facilities (along with factories) in the
country. (Mexico, by comparison, seems content to accept factories
with no higher-level facilities to provide white-collar
opportunities.)
In the discussions of why India has been able to get millions of
service jobs (e.g., call centers), the widespread knowledge of
English was given as a major factor. It has been said that the two
good things England did for India were to build the railroads and
to wipe out the Thuggee. Perhaps one needs to add a third: to
introduce English.
Meredith claims that some jobs cannot be off-shored, and gives as
an example personal services like plastic surgery. But this is
wrong--people are more than willing to travel to India, or
Thailand, or the Philippines, to get major surgery done for a
fraction of what it would cost in the United States0
As for the audiobook experience, I have to say that long lists and
statistics don't work well in audiobooks. For example, a list of
the major United States companies served by an Indian call center
would be fine in a print book, but listening to the narrator
reading off dozens of company names is boring, and uninformative.
These seem to be filler in any case, along with such things as a
long description of how flax is made into linen.
And Meredith loves the word "tectonic".
ALL THE WONDERS WE SEEK: THIRTEEN TALES OF SURPRISE AND PRODIGY by
Félix Martí-Ibáñez (no isbn) was first published in 1960, but two
of the stories appeared in WEIRD TALES in the early 1950s. Before
I comment on the stories, let me point out that Martí-Ibáñez is yet
another doctor who writes speculative fiction, though his writings
tend more towards fantasy. More current examples are Michael
Crichton (definitely science fiction) and F. Paul Wilson (horror).
But Martí-Ibáñez's model is more from the mainstream, since his
dedication reads, "To William Somerset Maugham, greatest modern
example of the physician as homme de lettres, whose friendship has
been throughout the years an evergreen source of joy, inspiration,
and enlightenment."
Another general observation is that although Martí-Ibáñez was born
and raised in Spain, and later moved to the United States, his
stories are all set in Latin America. One might say they are
magical realism (see last week's column), but in any case, Martí-
Ibáñez apparently felt that the atmosphere needed for his stories
was neither Iberian nor North American. (Not until such writers as
Mark Helprin and Neil Gaiman did this sort of writing with North
American settings gain a wide audience.) One perhaps sees the
inspiration of Maugham here, since Maugham set many of his stories
in hot jungle climates.
But Martí-Ibáñez is very even-handed about his settings. Every
story is set in a different country (or in some cases, two),
meaning that of the seventeen continental Latin American countries
or territories, he covers all but Mexico, Panama, and Uruguay, as
well as having one story set in Cuba. (Belize, Guyana, Surinam,
and French Guiana cannot really be included in Latin America in
this context.) And there is no duplication of countries, leading
one to think that this was intentional.
"The Sleeping Bell", for example, takes place in the Colombian
jungle. We know this because in the very first paragraph he
writes, "when one is traveling on foot in the Colombian jungle...."
Indeed, he is very explicit in every story about where the events
take place. Unlike some authors whose descriptions are either
vague or contradictory, Martí-Ibáñez is quite clear in his
locations. And like many of his other stories, this one is rooted
in the events of the Spanish conquest--in this case the story of a
pagan statue and a church bell.
"The Star Hunt" (which takes place in Ecuador) uses another
recurring theme: the desire to escape from "the commonplace and
hopeless." The main character goes out one morning on an errand
and finds himself drawn into a series of extraordinary adventures
far beyond his normal banal existence.
"A Tomb in Malacor" is one of the WEIRD TALES stories and takes
place between Managua (Nicaragua) and Guatemala City (Guatemala).
It has a real "Twilight Zone" feel to it, but definitely pre-dates
the series, so it is possible that this is one of the stories that
inspired Rod Serling.
"Niña Sol" is set in high-altitude Peru, "The Seekers of Dreams" in
"Maitecas, close to the steaming Paraguayan jungle" (what an
evocative description!), "The Buried Paradise" in La Paz (Bolivia),
and "Amigo Heliotropo" in Honduras and El Salvador.
The inspiration for "Between Two Dreams" may very well be the story
of Zhuang Zhou (a.k.a. Chuang Tzu), who fell asleep one day and
dreamt he was a butterfly. When he woke up, he wondered whether he
was Zhuang Zhou dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly
dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou. I find Martí-Ibáñez's choice of Costa
Rica a little unusual for a tale of a conquistador, although I
suppose if Central America was good enough for "stout Cortez", ....
Okay, that's a literary reference--I know Cortez was not in Central
America. (This is the other WEIRD TALES story.)
"The Song Without Words" (set in Argentina) has a definite Pied
Piper sub-text (or maybe not even so "sub") as well as having the
popular fantasy plot device of the circus. Even when the circus is
not literally magical, the whole philosophy of a circus is magic--
something beyond our daily existence.
"The Threshold of the Door", set in Caracas (Venezuela), is a story
that with a couple of additional phrases could have appeared in
Clifton Fadiman's FANTASIA MATHEMATICA. "Stand sideways on the
threshold and walk sideways toward the frame. ... if you walk
straight toward the frame without fear, I promise you that you
shall enter the poetic world whole and safe. You know why?
Because in our world doors are horizontal instead of vertical. Our
doors, when open, cross yours. That is why you can't enter the
poetic world through the opening of your doors. You must stand
sideways on your threshold and walk straight into the side beam.
You will then enter the invisible door of our world." Even as it
is, without any descriptions of the fourth (spatial) dimension, it
seems inspired by Edwin A. Abbott's FLATLAND ("Upward, not
northward!").
"Havana: 60 Longitude West, 70 Latitude South" is not a typo, even
though Havana is actually 82.33 Longitude West, 23 Latitude North.
(The title actually has degree symbols, but I cannot do them in
ASCII.) Let's just say that this brings plate tectonics to a whole
new level.
"Senhor Zumbeira's Leg" (set in Brazil) is a story that could
easily have come almost directly from the Arabian Nights. Not that
it is a secret--it is clear that that is what Martí-Ibáñez
intended. Is it just accidental that the only story based on a
story cycle from "the mysterious East" is set in the only non-
Spanish-language country in Latin America--or is it that Martí-
Ibáñez chose Brazil as the most foreign to himself as a native of
Spain?
"Riquiqui, I Love You!" (set in Chile) was listed in the table of
contents as "Riquiqui, I Lov Youe!", which actually sounded more
mysterious. Alas, this title *was* a typo, and while the story was
fine, the misprint seemed so redolent with atmosphere that I was at
least a little disappointed.
Martí-Ibáñez has written a lot of other books. Most seem to be
histories of medicine. He has at least one other collection of
stories (WALTZ), a historical novel, a humorous novel, and a travel
book. I suppose it is good that he can write in many fields, but
it does mean that we have not gotten as much speculative
fiction/fantasy/magical realism from him as we might otherwise have
gotten. [-ecl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
There is frequently more to be learned from the
unexpected questions of a child than the
discourses of men, who talk in a road, according
to the notions and prejudices of their education.
-- John Locke, 1693