THE MT VOID
12/30/22 -- Vol. 41, No. 27, Whole Number 2256

Co-Editor: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Co-Editor: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Sending Address: evelynchimelisleeper@gmail.com
All material is the opinion of the author and is copyrighted by the
author unless otherwise noted.
All comments sent or posted will be assumed authorized for
inclusion unless otherwise noted.

To subscribe or unsubscribe, send mail to eleeper@optonline.net
The latest issue is at <http://www.leepers.us/mtvoid/latest.htm>.
An index with links to the issues of the MT VOID since 1986 is at <http://leepers.us/mtvoid/back_issues.htm>.

Topics:
Problems Sending Last Week's MT VOID (comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Science Fiction (and Other) Discussion Groups, Films,
Lectures, etc. (NJ)
Mark's Picks for Turner Classic Movies in January
(comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
"Radium Age" Science Fiction (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
CATHERINE CALLED BIRDY (letter of comment by Gary McGath)
This Week's Reading (THE BOOK OF NOTHING) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)

===================================================================

TOPIC: Problems Sending Last Week's MT VOID (comments by Evelyn
C. Leeper)

Last week, Yahoo decided to reject all the addresses on yahoo.com,
as well as those on aol.com, verizon.net, ameritech.net, att.net,
cs.com, outlook.com, and sfsnnj.com (which I'm guessing go through
yahoo.com as a gateway).

Strangely, we didn't get bounces on mail we sent out about the
problem. I suspect that means that something *in* the MT VOID is
the problem, but I don't know what. We eventually sent PDF version
to those subscribers affected, and those were not rejected.

You can always pick the MT VOID up up as HTML from my web page <http://leepers.us/mtvoid/latest.htm> or <http://leepers.us/mtvoid/VOIDmmdd.htm>, where "mmdd" is the month
and date. (If we see massive failures, we will try to get that up
ASAP.)

Anyone who wants to switch to PDF, please let us know. [-ecl]

===================================================================

TOPIC: Science Fiction (and Other) Discussion Groups, Films,
Lectures, etc. (NJ)

Meetings are still fluctuating between in-person and Zoom. The
best way to get the latest information is to be on the mailing
lists for them.

January 5, 2023 (MTPL), 5:30PM: "To Serve Man" by Damon Knight and
"Twilight Zone" episode thereof
<https://tinyurl.com/HowToServeMan-Knight>
Jan 5 TO SERVE MAN (1962): by Damon Knight
Feb 2 ALPHAVILLE (1965) & "You'd Be Surprised"(a.k.a. "Don't Be
Surprised") by Peter Cheyney (not SF)
<https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/14748408>
<https://tinyurl.com/Cheyney-BeSurprised>
<https://tinyurl.com/Cheyney-Complete-99c>

===================================================================

TOPIC: Mark's Picks for Turner Classic Movies in January (comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)

If you want a nice, amiable, and really enjoyable comedy try
DESIGNING WOMAN (1957). This was a film that one of the major
studios launched to be played on national TV. But then the film
was seemingly forgotten, Which is why it had to be introduced to
me twice.

At the time it was made there had been several popular comedies
with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. This film was probably
written with them in mind, but the script was shot with Gregory
Peck, and it suffered none at all by the substitution. Grace Kelly
was originally cast as the female lead, but she had given up her
acting career to marry the Prince of Monaco. She probably would
have been a little too demure in the role anyway. Peck plays a
newspaper sportswriter doing an expose on organized crime
infiltrating the fight racket. Off in Florida to cover a golf
tournament, he meets a fashion designer who is as different from
him as seems possible. Yet opposites attract. Bacall becomes
suspicious and obsessed with a woman out of Peck's past, but what
she really should be concerned about are the gangsters ready to
kill her husband. Adding to the confusion is Maxie Stultz, a
punch-drunk prizefighter given to Peck as a bodyguard. Vincent
Minelli directed the script by George Wells, who won an Academy
Award for Best Screenplay. (It has lines like "Maxie Stultz sleeps
with his eyes open"--well, you have to see it in the film to
appreciate it.) If you see it, give my regards to Maxie Stultz.

[DESIGNING WOMAN, Sunday, January 15, 2:30PM]

[-mrl/ecl]

===================================================================

TOPIC: "Radium Age" Science Fiction (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)

"Our modern world can sometimes appear like a story out of science fiction—and yet the triumphs and failures we experience in current
days were, surprisingly, oftentimes foretold by thinkers of the
past. The MIT Press’s new Radium Age series, under the guidance of
editor Joshua Glenn, seeks to resurface these prescient stories by
reissuing notable proto-science fiction from the underappreciated
era between 1900 and 1935."

Read more at
<https://mitpress.mit.edu/blog/introducing-radium-age/>.

Michael Dirda, book reviewer for the Washington Post, and unabashed
science fiction fan, has reviewed four of these at:

<https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/03/23/world-of-women/>

<https://tinyurl.com/dirda-clockwork-man>

<https://tinyurl.com/dirda-nodenholts-million>

<https://tinyurl.com/dirda-of-one-blood>

[-ecl]

===================================================================

TOPIC: CATHERINE CALLED BIRDY (letter of comment by Gary McGath)

In response to Mark and Evelyn's review of CATHERINE CALLED BIRDY
in the 12/23/22 issue of the MT VOID, Gary McGath writes:

[re comments on the use of modern language in the film]

All I've seen of CATHERINE CALLED BIRDY is the trailer, so I can't
comment knowledgeably on it, but I think modernized grammar is
entirely acceptable and often preferable in portraying the Middle
Ages. Getting it right is hard and is apt to confuse people. If
the setting is before 1066, the Anglo-Saxon people spoke then is
effectively a foreign language. "Translating" the dialogue into
modern English avoids a lot of problems.

Avoiding modern word imagery is more important when trying to
immerse the reader or viewer. A character in the trailer talks
about a pox "going around." This feels like a modern way of
thinking about a disease. Immersion seems to be the last thing the
creators had in mind, so the anachronism may have been intentional.
A serious treatment might talk about a pox "descending on" or
"sweeping through" the area. [-gmg]

Evelyn notes:

The film takes place in 1290, so the language would be Middle
English. [-ecl]

===================================================================

TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)

My first complaint about THE BOOK OF NOTHING: VACUUMS, VOIDS, AND
THE LATEST IDEAS ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF THE UNIVERSE by John
D. Barrow (Pantheon, ISBN 978-0-375-42099-3) is that *someone*
decided to use a font that used "I" (the capital letter "I") to
represent the digit "1" ("one"). Maybe they have secret crush on
Roman numerals, but back in the day, when there were typewriters
without a "1" digit in the top row, everyone used "l" (a lower-case
"L") instead. (And we used "single-quote--backspace--period" for
an exclamation point.)

And well before the current grammatical dispute about pronouns,
Barrow manages to make a complete hash of *all* the rules. In
discussing LifeSaver candy, Barrow writes, "Nobody seems to notice
that they are buying a toroidal confection that contains a good
chunk of empty space, but then he wouldn't." Traditionally,
"nobody" is considered singular, so the "they" is theoretically
incorrect. Later, Barrow switches to "he", changing from a
genderless "plural" to a gendered singular pronoun. Clearly,
Barrow wants to have his cake and eat it too. (And the rule about
"nobody" being singular is part of a rule that says "no one",
"everybody", and "everyone" being singular. But no one would say,
"Everybody was at the party and he had a good time.")

I realize that neither of these address the substance of the book.
Barrow begins with the concept of zero--or rather, the two concepts
of zero. Zero served both as a place-holder in positional
numerical notation, and as the result of such arithmetical
operations as "3 minus 3". Barrow progresses to how zero implies
infinity, and then moves on to the idea of nothing as a vacuum in
space (not outer space, necessarily, but any section of space
containing nothing).

At times philosophical, at times mathematical, at times scientific,
it eventually got too abstruse for me to follow, but I would still
recommend it. [-ecl]

===================================================================

Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net


Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads
your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of
broken-down patois which is something like the way a
Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive,
God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.
--Raymond Chandler
(to Edward Weeks)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)