THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
01/02/04 -- Vol. 22, No. 27
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
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Topics:
Let's Roomba (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
MALTESE FALCON Trivia (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE (movie review by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (SMOKE AND MIRRORS, THE INVISIBLE
COUNTRY, and CHANGING PLANES) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Let's Roomba (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I see that we finally are in the age of the household robot. Have
you seen these new vacuum cleaners that run round the floor on
their own? They use some sort of search algorithm I don't
understand, but you don't have to walk with them. They just run
around the floor picking things up particles on their own. What a
terrific idea that is! They do the housework and don't need to
bother you. You just have to send them out and empty them when
they are done. I thought the ad on TV was so interesting I had
to stop what I was doing and watch it. What I was doing,
incidentally, was spraying for ants in the house. Yeah, we have
an ant problem. I am disgusted by just the thought of them
running around my floors, picking up food particles that have
fallen. I don't know how they find this stuff, but they do. It
is shocking, just shocking. It occurs to me that I don't need a
Roomba that I have to maintain when I have hundreds of little
Roombas running around. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: MALTESE FALCON Trivia (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I was watching the film OSCAR, which is set in 1929. Someone
refers to hoods as "gunsels." By that he meant thugs with guns.
Probably few people catch it, but that is an anachronism. In fact
if he used that term in 1929 he would have been implying something
very different from what the writer was intending. The word came
into common usage when it was heard in John Huston's THE MALTESE
FALCON. You may remember that Caspar Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet)
had a hoodlum of small stature working him, Wilmer (Elisha Cook,
Jr.). It is important that he was small of stature, though that
is not immediately obvious from the way the word is used now. He
has multiple confrontations with detective Sam Spade (Humphrey
Bogart) and always come off in a distant second place. Spade
refers to him as Gutman's gunsel. This makes Wilmer even madder.
Most people thought it was underworld slang for gunman, hearing
the word "gun" in it. That is how the word has been used since.
But that wasn't what Spade was saying.
The dialog was taken straight from the novel THE MALTESE FALCON by
Dashiell Hammett. Hammett wrote the novel for "Black Mask," a
crime pulp magazine.
Hammett's editor was a guy named Joe Shaw. Shaw attempted to keep
his publication as refined as possible for a pulp magazine. Hence
when Hammett had used the term Gooseberry Lay for a false clue,
what we would call a red herring, Shaw objected that the term was
too suggestive. Hammett protested that his word was the genuine
underworld term, but Shaw would have none of it. Hammett decided
as revenge he would find a way to say something dirty in a novel
that Shaw would not even notice. That word turned out to be
"gunsel."
So what is a gunsel? In Yiddish ganz is goose. A little goose is
a ganzl. Yiddish seems to like to use small birds as slang for
homosexuality. Feigele is Yiddish for "little bird." Applied to
a person it means a male who is gay. A ganzl is a boy kept for
purposes of illicit sex by an older man. By the 1920s the word
had been corrupted until it was "gunsel." Hammett knew the word,
but Joe Shaw didn't. Hammett used the word in the dialog. Shaw
read it and assumed it was just a way of saying "gunman." When
Bogart used the word in the film most everyone else jumped to the
same conclusion. And since few things in life are as democratic
as language (at least languages other than French) that is what
the word has come to mean.
Note that when Gutman says that Wilmer is like a son to him it is
probably a reference to Spade's comment. It is amazing that these
people know so much Yiddish.
While we are on the subject of misunderstandings that came out of
this film, the legend from the book is all about the Knights
Hospitallers of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. That is the
way the legend appears in the novel and also in the main part of
the script. But that is not how the text at the beginning of the
film goes. They have an introduction in which they say, "In 1539,
the Knight Templars of Malta, paid tribute to Charles V of Spain,
by sending him a Golden Falcon." The actual legend is about the
Knights Hospitallers, but for some reason the Knights Templars are
better known, and that may be why it was changed in the scrolling
text at the beginning of the film. The two groups should not be
confused. They were sort of rival gangs.
What were they exactly? During the Crusades there was a lot of
gold and booty for the looting by the Crusaders in the Holy Lands.
But then the crusaders had a problem. They had to get the stuff
back home. Gold is heavy. Many found that they really didn't
want all that they had looted. There were Church groups that said
that they would take the excess loot and use it for good Christian
purposes. This would have the added benefit of being a good deed
that would by the crusader a better place in heaven. One charity
was the hospitals for their fallen comrades. There was plenty of
booty to be given away and these two organizations; the
Hospitallers saw a lot of riches coming their way. In fact, they
got far more than they needed for their missions. The members of
the Hospitaller order became richer and richer.
The Knights Templar were actually knights who set up a
headquarters in the captured Dome of the Rock Mosque. They also
became a religious order. They too became powerful. Not
surprisingly, the Holy Land was not big enough for both
organizations and they often conflicted. Both were wealthy and
well connected. But they should not be confused with each other
as they were in the film, THE MALTESE FALCON. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE (movie review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: This is the story of a September-September love
relationship between two middle-aged people. Each of them has the
option to have relationships with much younger mates. The first
half of the film is charming, the second half a bit tedious.
There is not much screen chemistry between Jack Nicholson and
Diane Keaton. Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
Harry (played by Jack Nicholson) is a wealthy bachelor philanderer
with a taste for dating women half his age. He is going to spend
a weekend with one, Marin (Amanda Peet), in the Hamptons. When
Marin's mother Erica Barry (Diane Keaton) shows up unexpectedly
she takes an instant dislike to Harry. The plot of the first half
of the film is simple, sweet, and familiar. As a separate film it
might end right there. The second half shows us the foibles of
men and how Harry ruins the good thing that he had for something
flashy without substance. (The middle-aged men in the audience
were well chastised without benefit of having been offered either
the good thing or the flashy one.) Late in the film there is a
montage of scenes intended to win sympathy for Erica. It
backfires badly and at least in my case I lost rather than gained
empathy for the character.
The film written and directed by Nancy Meyers has some familiar
faces in unlikely roles including Keanu Reeves as a bland but
pleasant physician with an interest in Erica. Frances McDormand
plays Erica's sister and has little to do.
Jack Nicholson breaks some new emotional ground in his acting, but
I never bought him and Keaton as a romantic couple. The first
half of this film is pleasant enough, but the lesson in the second
half ruins the fun. It is like a lollipop with a vitamin pill
center. I rate it high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
All of this week's books are collections of short fiction.
I'm catching up on Neil Gaiman's writing with his collection of a
few years ago, SMOKE AND MIRRORS, and can say that his Hugo-
winning AMERICAN GODS was not a fluke. (Well, since he won
another Hugo the next year for CORALINE, I guess that's obvious.)
Somehow, though, he seems to have burst upon the traditional
fiction scene with it. Previously I knew him best for his work in
graphic novels, and for co-authoring GOOD OMENS with Terry
Pratchett. Yes, I knew he had other books out there, but he
seemed to be below a lot of poeple's radar.
Paul McAuley's THE INVISIBLE COUNTRY was another collection of
short fiction by a British writer, although I was more familiar
with McAuley because of his alternate history, PASQUALE'S ANGEL,
which won the Sidewise Award in the first year those awards were
presented. Both PASQUALE'S ANGEL and THE INVISIBLE COUNTRY are
recommended--I am glad to see collections being published, since I
think that too often short fiction gets ignored as soon as the
magazine or book it appeared in is pulled from the racks.
Ursula K. LeGuin's CHANGING PLANES sounded very promising in a
review I read, about a woman who discovers how to travel to
alternate planes of reality and visit unusual cultures. But I
shouldn't have been surprised to find that rather than the
Borgesian snippets (such as "The Babylonian Lottery") I had hoped
for, what I got were stories very similar to most of LeGuin's
other recent fiction, with a lot of "message" mixed in. They
weren't bad, but I am seeing a certain "sameness" to her writing
that makes me feeling I'm just reading the same piece over and
over. (These are individual pieces, but thematically connected
and all written specifically for this book, so some may consider
this a novel that than a collection of short fiction.) [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you,
then they fight you, then you win.
-- Mahatma Gandhi
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