THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
10/08/10 -- Vol. 29, No. 15, Whole Number 1618
C3PO: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
R2D2: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Science Fiction (and Other) Discussion Groups (NJ)
Eleven Astounding Sci-Fi Predictions That Came True
Spartan Democracy (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Really Bizarre Optical Illusion (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Reevaluating Films (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Second-Person Narratives (letters of comment by Kip Williams
and Philip Chee)
This Week's Reading (AND GOD SAID, AN ANTHROPOLOGIST ON MARS,
and TEMPLE GRANDIN) (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: Science Fiction (and Other) Discussion Groups (NJ)
October 14 (Thu): INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS by Jack Finney,
Middletown (NJ) Public Library, 1956 film at 5:30PM,
discussion of film and book after film
October 21 (Thu): EVER SINCE DARWIN by Stephen Jay Gould,
Old Bridge (NJ) Public Library, 7PM
November 18 (Thu): IDORU by William Gibson, Old Bridge (NJ)
Public Library, 7PM
[The Middletown Public Library is doing their annual counts of
their discussion groups in October, so if you want to see this
group continue, please try to attend the October meeting. -ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Eleven Astounding Sci-Fi Predictions That Came True
http://mashable.com/2010/09/25/11-astounding-predictions/
==================================================================
TOPIC: Spartan Democracy (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
It is an interesting fact that in Sparta voting was not done by
ballots but by shouting. The proposition that receives the loudest
shouts wins. This makes very difficult the administration of
absentee ballots. One interesting effect is that it helps to roll
out the old ways and being change. A twenty-year old nitwit can
yell louder than two wise old men. If you have laryngitis you lose
your franchise. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Really Bizarre Optical Illusion (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
If you want to see a really good optical illusion, one that is very
counter-intuitive, go to http://leepers.us/optical_illusion.gif.
Note that all the dots are pink and form a circle around the cross.
None of them are any other color. Now stare directly at the cross.
What happens to the dots?
This may be the most confounding optical illusion I have ever seen.
If someone has a good explanation for what is happening, I would
love to hear it. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Reevaluating Films (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
A reader asks me if there are films that I think I rated wrongly,
either rating too highly or too low. Apparently he does not agree
with a rating or two, which is par for the course. The answer is
going to be "no, I have never been wrong in a rating" but that is
not as pompous as it sounds. Let me explain before I say no. One
of my reviews is one person's impression of a film on a single
viewing. Generally it is the first viewing. But in any case what
I give really is my impression of the film on that many viewings.
That does not mean that I would have the same impression today or
even that I would have the same impression on a second viewing.
But then I am assuming that the reader I am writing for would want
to know if the film was good on a first viewing. Some films could
be studied in depth and would get better (or worse). But it is the
first-time viewer I really am writing for.
Some films I see strike me one way when I first see them and either
the virtues or the faults predominate. Further thought may cause
me to give a different rating. Some films I am just indifferent to
initially, but on the second or third viewing they stand up and get
better. Films that I think are better than I thought they were
initially in my original review include RESTORATION and GALAXY
QUEST. I thought both were decent films, but both improved for me
on subsequent viewings. RESTORATION particularly is for me today a
much better film than I thought originally. It is an excellent
recreation of London in the 1660s. That is the reign of Charles II
and the recently restored monarchy. The main character is Robert
Merivale, played by Robert Downey Jr., trained but discouraged as a
physician, he becomes a playboy in the Court of Charles II, but his
world is turned upside-down and he is cast out and sees how the
less advantaged live in the England during turbulent times, which
include the Plague Year of 1665 and the Great London Fire of 1666.
And the character of Merivale and what happens to him is as
interesting as the time. If I were rating this film again, I would
probably give it a high +3 instead of the high +1 I gave it (-4 to
+4 scale).
Sometimes a few days after seeing a film I will start to have
doubts about how I rated a film. I would say a week after seeing
INCEPTION (when I wrote these comments) the good points are still
there, but the films faults stick out in my mind more. After a
half summer without much intelligence in the films being released
it had interesting ideas with these nested dream worlds, but it
seems to me these rules about the dreams are a complete
fabrication. With a world full of people dreaming every night, it
is surprising how bad cinema is in accurately portraying the
dreaming experience. Christopher Nolan gives us this rule that
there are three levels of dreams within dreams, each with a
different timescale. And if you wander in too deeply you are in
danger of never coming out. There are extremely few gun battles in
*my* dreams. Nolan is not describing my dreaming; he is defining a
videogame. That is interesting, but it does not reflect anything
real. I think it is a good fantasy film, but unlike his THE
PRESTIGE I have little desire to see it again. THE PRESTIGE had
more interesting and better-developed characters. I could get
involved in what the characters were doing. INCEPTION is a film
that I can see was complex, but does not have the ideas to draw me
in. I would rather keep it at a distance. I think Nolan should
limit his action films to the Batman films. And even in the two
Batman films it is not his strong suit. Right now I would probably
rate INCEPTION lower than I did just a few weeks ago. Of course if
I was to see the film again, I could be reminded of what made me
like the film in the first place.
The problem is that a film is a good deal more than a point on a
rating scale. It is a whole landscape. Do I rate INCEPTION on its
engaging ideas or its un-engaging characters? Without seeing the
film again, I would probably not say I want to change the rating.
But it is hard to remember what were the good points that earned a
high +2 from me? It is hard to remember at this point. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Second-Person Narratives (letters of comment by Kip
Williams and Philip Chee)
In response to Evelyn's comments on second-person narratives in the
10/01/10 issue of the MT VOID, Kip Williams, writes:
There was a second-person horror story in a collection, possibly
Boris Karloff's TALES OF THE FRIGHTENED (there's Boris again),
where everything is being told to the reader who apparently
participated in these awful events, and has now forgotten them. The
title is similar enough to "The House of Blue Leaves" that once I
heard of the latter, I couldn't remember the former any more.
It might have been a different paperback I had around the same
time. I'm getting an impression these stories are all by Michael
Avallone; also Amazon is not enlightening as to the table of
contents, and the copy of the book that I had was lent around 1982
to a speech coach who surprised us all by absconding, and I don't
recall getting the book back. (Say, I've forgotten my name again.
Could you look at the tag on my shirt for me?)
um, Kip W.
Yeah, that's it.
[-kw]
And Philip Chee adds, "And of course I've recently read HALTING STATE
by Charles Stross told almost entirely in the second person." [-pc]"
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
AND GOD SAID by Dr. Joel M. Hoffman (ISBN 978-0-312-56558-9), about
Bible translation, would seem to have no connection to science
fiction. (Fantasy, perhaps, but that's another issue.) But in his
introduction, talking about how seriously people take Bible
translations, Hoffman writes [asterisks indicate Hoffman's
italics]:
"... in the fall of 1993, a Yale student named Kevin Wilson began a
project to translate the Bible into Klingon. ... Wilson's team
included nearly a dozen scholars, among them Dr. Lawrence
M. Schoen, who had already earned a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology,
and the Reverned Professor Glen Proechel, then a Spanish instructor
at the University of Minnesota. But Professor Proechel ended up
quitting the translation project in protest, arguing that
*Dr. Schoen was doing it wrong*. 'It's not going to make any
sense,' the way Wilson's gang was doing it, he told THE WALL STREET
JOURNAL in June of 1994, explaining that Klingons' 'mode of thought
is quite different.'" There are no Klingons, there is no Klingon
thought, and except for what linguist Dr. Marc Okrand invented for
the 1984 movie STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK, there is no
Klingon language. But that didn't stop too qualified academicians
from taking their vehement disagreement to the media."
That said, Hoffman then proceeds to spend quite a bit of time
talking about translation problems in general, sometimes using the
Bible for his examples, but often not. He also uses modern Hebrew,
but that is pure coincidence. For example, modern Hebrew has two
words for blue: "kachol" for dark blue, "t'chelet" for light blue.
How would one translate into Hebrew a line of a poem that read in
English, "and two blue blocks, one light, one dark"? (However,
Hoffman's claim that we have something similar in English, with
light red being "pink" is not entirely convincing--after all, he
just used the words "light red" to define "pink", so clearly the
words "light red" have a meaning to us.)
[And in a previous MT VOID I raised the question how would you
translate into Hebrew the song lyric, "You say good-bye, but I say
hello"? -mrl]
AN ANTHROPOLOGIST ON MARS by Oliver Sacks (ISBN 978-0-679-43785-7)
is a collection of essays on neurology and related fields. In "To
See and Not See", about a man who regains his sight after almost an
entire lifetime without it, Sacks quotes another researcher with a
way of describing blindness that could have been the inspiration
(but probably wasn't) for Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life":
"[Alberto] Valvo comments, 'The real difficulty here is that
simultaneous perception of objects is an unaccustomed way to those
used to sequential perception through touch.' We, with a full
complement of senses, live in space and time; the blind live in a
world of time alone."
The centerpiece of AN ANTHROPOLOGIST ON MARS is the title
essay. "An Anthropologist on Mars" is by Oliver Sacks, but the
title originates with its primary subject, Temple Grandin, an
expert on animal behavior who is also perhaps the best-known "high-
performing" person with autism. Sacks sees these two aspects of
Grandin as somewhat paradoxical, since one of the effects of autism
is that it makes it difficult--in fact, often impossible--for its
victims to comprehend the meaning of many human behaviors. For
example, someone with autism could see another person crying and
not realize that meant that the person was sad (or, again
paradoxically, happy). In fact, they might not even be able to
explain what "sad" or "happy" was. Hence, Grandin describes
herself as being like "an anthropologist on Mars." Not
surprisingly, a lot of people with autism who are science fiction
fans are big fans of Mr. Spock and Data in "Star Trek".
Autism has another (or perhaps it's really the same) aspect: people
with autism see the world "slightly skewed". Grandin looks at the
night sky and doesn't see (or even understand) any of the usual
poetic images people without autism see. But this is not one-
sided: what she sees is not something that those without autism can
understand either.
All of this seems very connected to the whole idea of the Museum of
Jurassic Technology (which I described/reviewed in 2005 on my web
page at http://www.leepers.us/evelyn/mjt.htm), where everything
is slightly "off" from our understanding of the world. And autism
has another relation to Jorge Luis Borges's stories, in that those
with autism often have unusual memories, perhaps not as complete as
those of the character Funes, but certainly more so than the
average person's. For example, if you ask someone how many cars
were in the store's parking lot, they might answer, "About fifty."
But someone with autism might well reply, "Twenty-one black, twelve
beige, four red, two blue, and one green." At one point when
Grandin gave directions to Sacks, he stopped her and asked about
the last direction, at which point she repeated *the entire set* of
directions from the beginning.
Coincidentally, about a week after I read "An Anthropologist on
Mars", I saw the HBO film TEMPLE GRANDIN, which made clear a few
more details about being an anthropologist on Mars. The really key
point is that Grandin was the first person with autism to tell the
rest of us what life was like to people with autism--what they saw,
what they felt, how they thought. Throughout the film, you see
visual images of how Grandin's mind works, and you see a lot of
doctors and other "experts" on autism who are completely wrong in
what they believe.
Assume you are given a sequence of numbers and asked to provide the
next number. For example, "2, 4, 6". Is the next number 8 (the
nth term is 2n)? Is it 10 (the nth term is 2 times the nth non-
composite number, or the nth term is 1 less than the n+1th prime)?
Is there some other more complicated rule? That was the sort of
guesswork the doctors were doing. Grandin was able to tell them
the rules.
[http://chesswanks.com/pot/IntelligenceTest.jpg -mrl]
In science fiction terms, what we are seeing is a first contact
situation. By this, I don't mean that those with autism are a
separate species, but that their mode of thinking is so unusual
that there is a certain parallel to such a meeting. And rather
than just observing and guessing, people could ask Grandin (and
eventually others) what was going on in their minds. (For example,
one of the things people have said about teaching other primates
sign language is that we might be able to ask a gorilla *why*
gorillas beat their chests. Two-way communication is
irreplaceable.)
[The film TEMPLE GRANDIN is reviewed in last week's VOID
http://leepers.us/grandin.htm -mrl]
(The essay "To See and Not See" also has references to Borges in
its footnotes.)
[-ecl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks
he already knows.
-- Epictetus (c.55-c.135)