THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
08/31/12 -- Vol. 31, No. 9, Whole Number 1717
Mr. Rochester: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Jane Eyre: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Speculative Fiction Lecture Series (NJ)
One of Life's Mysteries (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
A Country-Western James Bond Title Song??? (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
One More Reason to Know Math
My Picks for Turner Classic Movies for September (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
The Beloit College Mindset List (comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
DNA-Encoded Books
Correction to TRUE BLOOD Review (letter of comment
by Susan de Guardiola)
Jane's Guides (letter of comment by Bill Higgins)
This Week's Reading ("The Analytical Language of John
Wilkins") (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: Speculative Fiction Lecture Series (NJ)
The Old Bridge (NJ) Public Library will be hosting monthly meetings
of the Garden State Speculative Fiction Writers the first (open)
Saturday of each month at 11AM beginning with September 8. A
lecture by the guest speaker will start at noon. The schedule
announced so far:
September 8: Ginjer Buchanan (editor at Ace Books)
October 6: Ellen Datlow (Hugo-Award-winning editor)
November 3: Michael Penncavage (horror author)
==================================================================
TOPIC: A Country-Western James Bond Title Song??? (comments by
Mark R. Leeper)
A podcast I listen to reported that Johnny Cash submitted a song to
Eon Film Productions for use at the title song in THUNDERBALL. I
think we had a narrow escape. It seems totally out of character
for a spy film.
The song can be heard at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3rqS98seNA
I think Cash might have thought it was a song for a Western or at
the least a Bond song was outside of the range of his talents. In
any case it has a full backup so it sounds like some serious care
was taken to write and record this song. The information is
corroborated at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderball_(soundtrack)
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: One More Reason to Know Math
Russian physicist Igor Tamm won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1958.
During the Russian revolution, he was a physics professor at the
University of Odessa in the Ukraine. Food was in short supply, so
he made a trip to a nearby village in search of food. While he was
in the village, a bunch of anti-communist bandits surrounded the
town. The leader was suspicious of Tamm, who was dressed in city
clothes. He demanded to know what Tamm did for a living. He
explained that he was a university professor looking for food.
"What subject?" the bandit leader asked. Tamm replied, "I teach
mathematics."
"Mathematics?" said the leader. "Okay. Then give me an estimate of
the error one makes by cutting off a Maclaurin series expansion at
the nth term. Do this and you will go free. Fail, and I will
shoot you."
Tamm was not just a little astonished. At gunpoint, he managed to
work out the answer. He showed it to the bandit leader, who
perused it and then declared, "Correct! Go home." Tamm never
discovered the name of the bandit.
[From "Calculus makes you live longer", in 100 ESSENTIAL THINGS YOU
DIDN'T KNOW YOU DIDN'T KNOW, by John Barrow]
==================================================================
TOPIC: My Picks for Turner Classic Movies for September (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
This is my monthly column on the interesting films coming up on TCM
that you might otherwise have missed. All times given are East
Coast time so either adjust or move east. Maybe next month I will
give the West Coast times just to keep people on their toes. This
month the pickings are a little scarce for interesting and rare
films. There is a block of some interest to horror fans the second
night of the month.
The night of Sunday, Sept 2, to Monday, September 3, the TCM theme
seems to be hands that get out of hand. Hands seem to have a mind
of their own in four films starting at 8 PM. The films are HANDS
OF A STRANGER (1962) at 8 PM, THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS (1946) at
9:45 PM, MAD LOVE (1935) at 11:30 PM, and the original 1925 THE
HANDS OF ORLAC at 12:45 AM. Now a question: which of these films
is different from the others and why? The answer is that THE BEAST
WITH FIVE FINGERS is the only one of the four *not* based on
Maurice Renard's novel LES MAINS D'ORLAC. That novel was adapted
four times into films. The fourth, which is not being shown, is
THE HANDS OF ORLAC (1960). That is a French-British production
with Mel Ferrer as Stephen Orlac. It also features Christopher
Lee, Felix Aylmer, Donald Wolfit, and Donald Pleasence.
Unfortunately, as I say, that one is not being shown. To confuse
matters that version was also released under the alternate title
HANDS OF A STRANGLER. So the title is one letter off from another
adaptation to be made two years later. The version I would
recommend is the 1925 silent adaptation, which stars one of the
great under-appreciated horror actors, Conrad Veidt. Veidt was
already one of the great horror actors of the silent screen--sort
of the European Lon Chaney. He is best known in this country for
playing villains in THE THIEF OF BAGDAD and CASABLANCA and perhaps
THE CABINET OF CALIGARY and THE MAN WHO LAUGHS. In the last he
played a man whose face had been carved into a constant grin, a
look that was immortalized as that of the Joker in Batman comic
books.
The four hand films are followed immediately by a fifth horror
film, SPIRITS OF THE DEAD (1968), on Monday, September 3, at 2:45
AM. This was a grand project I think to show that Europe could
make horror films as good as those of Roger Corman in the United
States. Originally it was to be a film of what I guess was epic
length in which seven directors would each direct a different Poe
story. Each director had an international reputation. Each story
would have major international stars. It was a great idea.
However, four of the directors either dropped out or were not
interested in the first place. That left it to a somewhat less
epic omnibus of three Poe stories, each with a major actor. The
stories chosen were to be ones not already made into major films.
The directors would co-write the screenplays as well as directing.
Roger Vadim took "Metzengerstein" with Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, and
James Robertson Justice. Louis Malle had "William Wilson" with
Brigitte Bardot and Alain Delon. And Federico Fellini took "Never
Bet the Devil Your Head" with Terence Stamp. The voice of Vincent
Price narrates. It was an interesting idea, but Roger Corman had
made Poe's best-loved stories already. In spite of prime directors
and actors and an artistic approach, the public seems to have more
appreciated unchallenging American adaptations of Poe's most
familiar films. SPIRITS OF THE DEAD turned out to be an
interesting failure and was soon forgotten.
The fantasy elements of GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE were a little
creaky, even back in 1933 when it was released. But the political
aspects of the film are astonishing today. The country is
suffering economically under the leadership of a corrupt President.
(The state of the country was about what you saw in KING KONG that
year.) President Judson C. Hammond (played by the wonderful Walter
Huston) is squeezing the country for the profit of his cronies.
Then the President is in a near fatal car accident. While on the
edge of death he is visited by the Archangel Gabriel. Controlled
by the angel he recovers to become a good President, at least in
the eyes of the filmmakers. What does a good President do? He
fires his cabinet and takes over in the country as a benevolent
dictator. With dictatorial powers he sets the government right and
then goes after organized crime. Seen from the 21st Century the
viewer does not know whether he is a good guy or a bad guy. I
guess we are supposed to like him, because he is being guided by
heaven, but his politics are just as strange today as they were in
1933. Actually the politics came not from God but from William
Randolph Hearst who at one time was nearly as powerful and just a
bit richer. (Tuesday, September 18, 8:00 PM.)
Howard Hawks directed the science fiction comedy MONKEY BUSINESS to
be shown Tuesday, September 11, at 8:00 PM. Before you start
having visions of the Marx Brothers, that film was made in 1931.
Howard Hawks' MONKEY BUSINESS is a science fiction comedy made in
1952 with Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Charles Coburn, Marilyn
Monroe, and Hugh Marlowe. Grant plays a research scientist unable
to create an elixir of youth. One of his test chimpanzees gets the
formula right just by chance and pours it into the water cooler.
The result is adults acting like children. It is not actually as
funny has Hawks expected, unfortunately. Today we see adults
acting like children all the time. In 1952 attitudes were
different. This was Robert Cornthwaite's 1952 science fiction
film. He was in a better one the year before, THE THING FROM
ANOTHER WORLD, and another the year after, WAR OF THE WORLDS.
I will not go into detail, but if you want a nice, amiable, and
really enjoyable comedy try DESIGNING WOMAN (1957) shown Sunday,
September 30 at 10:00 AM. The comedy was written for Spencer Tracy
and Katherine Hepburn, but Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall do just
fine with it. If you see it, give my regards to Maxie Stultz.
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2016 (comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper):
The Mindset List was created at Beloit College in 1998 to reflect
the world view of entering first year students. It started with the
members of the class of 2002, born in 1980. My ten favorite
entries from the Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2016:
7. Robert De Niro is thought of as Greg Focker's long-suffering
father-in-law, not as Vito Corleone or Jimmy Conway.
9. They have never seen an airplane "ticket."
12. For most of their lives, maintaining relations between the U.S.
and the rest of the world has been a woman's job in the State
Department.
23. Women have always piloted war planes and space shuttles.
42. Gene therapy has always been an available treatment.
63. The Twilight Zone involves vampires, not Rod Serling.
64. Robert Osborne has always been introducing Hollywood history on
TCM.
71. Despite being preferred urban gathering places, two-thirds of
the independent bookstores in the United States have closed for
good during their lifetimes.
72. Astronauts have always spent well over a year in a single space
flight.
73. Lou Gehrig's record for most consecutive baseball games played
has never stood in their lifetimes.
The full list is at http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2016/.
Some of the items are a little out of the ordinary. The one is
just snarky: "Slavery has always been unconstitutional in
Mississippi, and Southern Baptists have always been apologizing for
supporting it in the first place."
This one is attributed to iPods, video games, etc.: "A significant
percentage of them will enter college already displaying some
hearing loss."
They also included "History has always had its own channel," but
I've watched the "History" Channel lately, and I don't think it is
true any more. [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: DNA-Encoded Books
Seen on another mailing list:
From "IEEE Spectrum--Reading and Writing a Book With DNA"
http://tinyurl.com/9mwuanb:
"Harvard University researchers converted a 53,000 word book into
DNA and then read the DNA-encoded book using gene-sequencing
technology, the researchers report this week in Science."
"DNA can store more digital information per cubic millimeter than
flash memory or even cutting-edge experimental memories such as
quantum holography."
"Data stored in DNA is also recoverable for millennia."
"They converted an HTML draft of a book comprising 53,426 words,
11 JPG images, and one JavaScript program into a 5.27 megabit set
of zeros and ones. Using software they wrote, zeros were assigned
the letter A or C for the DNA bases adenine and cytosine, and ones
were assigned the letter G or T for DNA bases guanine and thymine."
"Church and his colleagues split the DNA sequence into short
chunks that were each 96 bases long. Each chunk included a 19-bit
bar code, or address, to show where that chunk belonged in the
whole of the book. The DNA was synthesized, inkjet-printed on a
glass DNA microchip, and then cleaved off and dried to form a
50-nanogram clump smaller than a speck of pollen."
"To convert the DNA back to a book, Church and his colleagues
read out the bases using commercially available sequencing
technology. They then arranged the sequence, decoded it back
to zeros and ones, and converted those back to an HTML book.
The researchers were able to complete the project with errors in
only 10 bits out of 5.27 million."
==================================================================
TOPIC: Correction to TRUE BLOOD Review (letter of comment by Susan
de Guardiola)
In response to Dale Skran's review of "TRUEBLOOD" in the 08/24/12
issue of the MT VOID, Susan de Guardiola writes:
Dear MARKLEEPER and EVELYNLEEPER,
The title of TRUE BLOOD is two words, not ONEWORD, as it repeatedly
appears in the DVDREVIEW in this issue of MTVOID.
Thanks,
SUSANDEGUARDIOLA
[-sdg]
Evelyn notes:
I blame the logo on the DVD case--it certainly looks like one
word. [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Jane's Guides (letter of comment by Bill Higgins)
Jane's Guides (letter of comment by Bill Higgins):
In response to Evelyn's comments on "Jane's" guides in the 08/24/12
issue of the MT VOID, Bill Higgins writes:
Apparently the identity of the mysterious Jane has caused many
people to wonder. Shane Stezelberger's 2001 posting to
rec.arts.sf.fandom is unforgettable. [-wh]
[Unfortunately, the URLs Bill sent do not appear to work. This
seems to be a problem with Google Groups. -ecl]
Shane Stezelberger wrote:
DUDE! When I was but a young military-aviation enthusiast
growing up in the hinterlands, I heard vague but persistent
mentions of this "Jane" character.
I mean, if you picked up a newspaper during the high Cold War,
there might've been a sidebar about the jet fighters that the
Russkies were shipping to Nicaragua. Details given of said
fighters were invariably credited to "Jane's All The World's
Aircraft," or "Jane's Defence Review." That sort of thing.
With very little to go on, I concocted the most elaborate of
fantasies. Jane was a real person, you see--much like Santa
Claus or Monty Python. She was a slender, well-preserved
brunette in her late thirties who wore her long brown hair in a
single braid. She ran a world-famous London-based organisation
of military analysts, with computers and fax machines humming
constantly, teletypes clattering out their global sitreps at all
hours, harried ubergeeks scurrying to and fro. Her office was a
large-windowed affair in the back corner, and her door was always
open. She usually worked at a drafting table, sitting on a tall
stool, poring over declassified intel photos. Upon her desk sat a
single ornamentation: a 1/32-scale presentation model of a
McDonnell-Douglas F-4J Phantom II, marked in the VF-197 "Shadow
Demon" squadron insignia of the USS Kitty Hawk. [-ss]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Jorge Luis Borges, "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins"
[This is an expansion of a previous column. The new material is
primarily that which deals with Umberto Eco's essay "The Language
of the Austral Land", published in his collection SERENDIPITIES.]
Much has been written about the classification scheme that Borges,
in "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins", purports to have
found in a Chinese encyclopedia: "a) belonging to the Emperor, b)
embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g)
stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) frenzied,
j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) et
cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a
long way off look like flies."
For many readers, John Wilkins probably seems as fictional as this
purported Chinese taxonomy. But he was real, and I found a
discussion of his analytical language in Umberto Eco's essay "The
Language of the Austral Land", published in his collection
SERENDIPITIES.]
According to Eco, Wilkins had "a system of 'Transcendental
Particles' intended to amplify or alter the character to which they
are applied. The list contemplates eight classes amounting to a
total of forty-eight particles, but the criterion that assembles
them is not at all systematic." The categories seem to encompass
the grammatical, the rhetorical, the causal, the inclusive, and the
functional. So "like+blood=crimson", but "place+metal=mine" and
"voice+lion=roar". Wilkins apparently supplies a long list of
these, but warns they are only examples, implying that there really
are not systematic rules.
Wilkins also had a series of categories and subcategories which
(theoretically) would partition (in a mathematical sense) the
universe. Wikipedia gives the following explanation/example:
"Concepts are divided into forty main Genera, each of which gives
the first, two-letter syllable of the word; a Genus is divided into
Differences, each of which adds another letter; and Differences are
divided into Species, which add a fourth letter. For instance, Zi
identifies the Genus of 'beasts' (mammals); Zit gives the
Difference of 'rapacious beasts of the dog kind'; Zita gives the
Species of dogs."
Other people have attempted similar analytical languages; none
appear to have caught on.
So while Borges's Chinese taxonomy does seem an odd set of
categories, it is no odder than that of Wilkins. Of course,
neither are "real"--but consider Japanese number classifiers.
In "The Story of Human Language", John H. McWhorter discusses
number classifiers, which is where I discovered them. He used
Cantonese as an example of a "number classifier language", but I
was able to find more information on Japanese, so I will use that.
Japanese has a special classifier (a.k.a. counter word, a.k.a.
number word) for counting flat things, a entirely different one for
people, another for birds or rabbits, one for small animals other
than birds or rabbits, one for small round things, one for
generations (distinct from the counter for people in general), and
so on.
For example, on a blog someone gave the example: "Thus in Japanese
ni-hon no nasu means 'two-roundthing of eggplant', while ni-ko no
nasu means 'two-longthing of eggplant', referring to two different
varieties of eggplant--one round and the other long, natch. The
number ni and the noun nasu are the same in both cases; only the
classifiers hon (also used when counting apples) and ko (also used
when counting pencils) vary."
(English has some counter words, e.g., "three head of cattle", "two
pair of pants") but Japanese has a lot, and they are *always*
required. There is a very long list at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_ counter_word.)
So, really, is Borges's classification scheme any less sensible
than the Japanese classifier scheme that divides animals into:
- small fish and shrimps
- birds or rabbits
- cephalopods and cups of drink
- small animals other than birds, rabbits, or cephalopods
- large animals
or has categories such as:
- rivers, ties, pencils, bottles, and guitars
- sheets of paper, plates, and articles of clothing
- desks, chairs, and long-stemmed glasses
- graves, wreaths, CPUs, reactors, elevators, and dams
- tools, trousers, and cakes of tofu
When James Franklin is talking about classification systems, in
WHAT SCIENCE KNOWS AND HOW IT KNOWS IT, he mentions that "the
Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges imagined the 'Celestial
Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge,' a Chinese encyclopedia that
classified animals according to the scheme: ..."
Franklin then claims, "Michel Foucault and some of his followers
made fools of themselves by appearing to believe the encyclopedia
was real, leading to justified complaints about the degeneracy of
the postmodernist academy." (This would have been in 1970, a
quarter of a century before Alan Sokal's 1996 hoax article in
SOCIAL TEXT, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a
Transformational Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity".
Now, according to Keith Windschuttle, Foucault writes that, "thanks
to 'the wonderment of this taxonomy,' we can apprehend not only
'the exotic charm of another system of thought' but also 'the
limitation of our own.' What the taxonomy or form of
classification reveals, says Foucault, is that 'there would appear
to be, then, at the other extremity of the earth we inhabit, a
culture ... that does not distribute the multiplicity of existing
things into any of the categories that make it possible for us to
name, speak and think.' The stark impossibility of our thinking in
this way, Foucault says, demonstrates the existence of an entirely
different system of rationality." Windschuttle goes on to relate
that in one seminar, someone cited Foucault and the Chinese
taxonomy. As Windschuttle puts it, "Didn't I realize, he chided,
that other cultures have such dramatically different conceptual
schemes that traditional assumptions of Western historiography are
inadequate for the task of understanding them?"
Clearly the person at the seminar believed the Emporium to be real.
However, what is quoted from Foucault above, and what else I can
find of what Foucault himself actually wrote doesn't quite support
the notion that Foucault was taken in. For example, Foucault says
(of THE ORDER OF THINGS: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES),
"This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the
laughter that shattered, as I first read the passage, all the
familiar landmarks of my thought.... In the wonderment of this
taxonomy, the thing we apprehended in one great leap, the thing
that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of
another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark
impossibility of thinking that. ... What is impossible is not the
propinquity of the things listed, but the very site on which their
propinquity would be possible. The animals '(i) frenzied, (j)
innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush'-where
could they ever meet, except in the immaterial sound of the voice
pronouncing their enumeration, or on the page transcribing it?
Where else could they be juxtaposed except in the non-place of
language?"
Two points: Foucault refers to the Emporium as a "fable", and he
says that some of the items on the list could only be juxtaposed in
"the non-place of language," that is, the fictional world of
literature.
In other words, as far as I can tell, there is not much evidence
that Foucault actually thought the Emporium to be real, and without
further evidence, Franklin's claim does not hold up.
Franklin gives his own critique of the Emporium from a scientific
standpoint: it has too much "self-reference, wildly different sizes
of categories, a combination of objective and human-focused
principles, [and] a mixture of the existent and the nonexistent."
I'm not sure all of these are valid complaints: the Linnaean system
of classification has wildly different sizes of categories, and
(arguably) a mixture of the existent and the nonexistent, at least
to the extent that it encompasses extinct plants and animals.
And if one goes back to the Japanese number classifications, the
categories there vary greatly in size and also do not have uniform
determinants. (By the latter I mean, for example, a system of
classifying animals based on number of legs, or on body mass.)
That does not make the Japanese system any less real, and indeed,
Borges could have put *it* in his essay with little change on the
effect.
In his essay, Borges also claims that the Bibliographic Institute
of Brussels has "divided the universe into 1000 subdivisions, from
which number 262 is the pope; number 282, the Roman Catholic
Church; 263, the Day of the Lord; 268 Sunday schools; 298,
mormonism; and number 294, brahmanism, buddhism, shintoism and
taoism. It doesn't reject heterogene subdivisions as, for example,
179: 'Cruelty towards animals. Animals protection. Duel and suicide
seen through moral values. Various vices and disadvantages.
Advantages and various qualities.'" [sic on capitalization]
The Bibliographic Institute of Brussels seems to be about as real
as the Chinese taxonomy.
Bibliography:
- Jorge Luis Borges, "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins"
- Umberto Eco, "The Language of the Austral Land" (SERENDIPITIES)
- Michel Foucault, THE ORDER OF THINGS: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE
HUMAN SCIENCES
- James Franklin, WHAT SCIENCE KNOWS AND HOW IT KNOWS IT
- Keith Windschuttle, Foucault
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counter_word
[-ecl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Mathematical discoveries, like springtime violets
in the woods, have their season which no man can
hasten or retard.
--Janos Bolyai