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THE MT VOID
05/29/26 -- Vol. 44, No. 48, Whole Number 2434
Editor: Evelyn Leeper,
evelynchimelisleeper@gmail.com
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Topics:
Middletown (NJ) Public Library Science Fiction Discussion
Group
Picks for Turner Classic Movies in June (comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Nicholas Cage and Quatermass (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (JUSTINIAN'S FLEA, PUBLIC SPECTACLES
IN ROMAN AND LATE ANTIQUE PALESTINE) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Middletown (NJ) Public Library Science Fiction Discussion
Group
June 4, 2026: THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES (1980 TV Parts 2 & 3)
& book by Ray Bradbury
<
https://archive.org/details/bwb_O8-CZL-512/page/n5/mode/2up>
===================================================================
TOPIC: Picks for Turner Classic Movies in June (comments by Evelyn
C. Leeper)
Once again, I have only three quarters of June's listings. Still,
I'll go with recommending a double feature of two excellent
mainstream films with Bob Hoskins, THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY and MONA
LISA, both set in the London criminal world. (You may want to turn
on the subtitles; when Hoskins was once asked why his films
weren't subtitled for American audiences, he responded that he
would have them subtitled when Marlon Brando's films were
subtitled in the UK. This was well before DVDs made subtitling de
rigueur for home video.)
Warning: the violence in THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY is described in the
IMDb "Parents Guide" as "Severe". MONA LISA is less violent, but
still not for the kiddies.
THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY (1980), Saturday, June 6, 1:30 AM
MONA LISA (1986), Saturday, June 6, 3:30 AM
There's also a Steven Spielberg "festival" Tuesday, June 9 through
Wednesday, June 10, about which nothing more needs to be said:
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), Tuesday, June 9, 8:00 PM
A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (2001), Tuesday, June 9, 10:30 PM
MINORITY REPORT (2002), Wednesday, June 10, 1:15 AM
POLTERGEIST (1982), Wednesday, June 10, 4:00 AM
Other films of interest (through June 22):
TUESDAY, June 2
6:00 AM Moby Dick (1930)
7:30 AM Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
12:45 PM Jungle Book (1942)
4:15 PM The Time Machine (1960)
6:00 PM She (1965)
12:15 AM Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
2:30 AM The Thing from Another World (1951)
4:00 AM Grey Gardens (1976)
WEDNESDAY, June 3
8:00 AM Camelot (1967)
SATURDAY, June 6
1:30 AM The Long Good Friday (1980)
3:30 AM Mona Lisa (1986)
10:00 AM Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966)
SUNDAY, June 7
4:00 PM Blithe Spirit (1945)
MONDAY, June 8
2:15 AM Black Moon (1975)
TUESDAY, June 9
3:15 AM It Happened Tomorrow (1944)
8:00 PM Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
10:30 PM A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
WEDNESDAY, June 10
1:15 AM Minority Report (2002)
4:00 AM Poltergeist (1982)
WEDNESDAY, June 10
4:00 PM Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
THURSDAY, June 11
8:00 PM Do the Right Thing (1989)
FRIDAY, June 12
7:00 AM Turnabout (1940)
8:30 AM Beyond Tomorrow (1940)
10:00 AM The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)
12:00 PM The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945)
1:30 PM I Married an Angel (1942)
3:00 PM Topper Returns (1941)
4:30 PM The Canterville Ghost (1944)
6:15 PM The Rocking Horse Winner (1949)
SATURDAY, June 13
12:00 AM Nightmare Alley (1947)
10:00 AM Tarzan and the Great River (1967)
2:00 PM House of Wax (1953)
6:15 PM Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982)
THURSDAY, June 18
1:30 AM Crack in the World (1965)
3:15 AM Meteor (1979)
5:15 AM The Swarm (1978)
9:15 AM King Kong (1933)
11:15 AM Two on a Guillotine (1965)
1:15 PM The Hypnotic Eye (1960)
2:45 PM Spider Baby (1964)
9:30 PM The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
FRIDAY, June 19
6:00 AM The Lodger (1927)
7:45 AM Young and Innocent (1937)
9:15 AM The Wrong Man (1956)
11:15 AM The Lady Vanishes (1938)
1:00 PM North by Northwest (1959)
5:45 PM Suspicion (1941)
SATURDAY, June 20
5:15 AM The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959)
10:00 AM Tarzan and the Jungle Boy (1968)
8:00 PM Rear Window (1954)
MONDAY, June 22
12:00 PM The Valley of Gwangi (1969)
2:00 PM Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966)
WEDNESDAY, June 24
8:00 PM The Andromeda Strain (1971)
10:15 PM On the Beach (1959)
THURSDAY, June 25
12:45 AM The Omega Man (1971)
2:30 AM The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959)
4:15 AM Night of the Living Dead (1968)
6:00 AM Gojira (1954)
FRIDAY, June 26
12:30 AM Christine (1983)
6:45 AM M (1931)
10:15 AM Mad Love (1935)
6:15 PM The Beast with Five Fingers (1946)
[-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Nicholas Cage and Quatermass (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
A recent interview with the New York Times has the following
exchange between the interviewer and Nicholas Cage:
Interviewer: This is slightly related: I read a Reddit "Ask Me
Anything" you did a couple years back, and the subject of praying
mantises came up, and you said, "Don't get me started on the
praying mantis." Why not?
Cage: Those aliens in the horror movie "Quatermass and the Pit"
looked like praying mantises and it flipped me out.
<
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/23/magazine/
nicolas-cage-interview.html>
[-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
JUSTINIAN'S FLEA: PLAGUE, EMPIRE, AND THE RISE OF EUROPE by
William Rosen (Penguin, ISBN 978-0-670-03855-8) is easy to read,
but annoying in two ways.
The first is that though the title seems to suggest the book is
about Justinian's Plague, but the first half of the book is about
the rise of Justinian, with a lot of detail about Belisarius's
defeat of the Persians at Dara, the building of the third version
of Hagia Sophia, and so on. Okay, this is still entertaining and
illuminating as background.
Then there is a long section talking about the bacterium that
caused the Plague, Yersinia pestis, and Rosen goes into great
detail about how it is spread, what the environmental conditions
need to be, why it didn't spread eastward along the Silk Road to
China (which had its own version in the 19th century), and so on.
He mentions a lot of theories about the geographical origin of Y.
pestis, including one by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe
which "posits an extraterrestrial birthplace for the plague, whose
periodicity is best explained by such activities as sunspots." The
theory claims the bacterium was brought to Earth on comets.
More annoying are sloppy errors. The first was on page 3, when
Rosen refers to "[sending] a satellite to the moons of Saturn."
No, we might send a probe, a rocket, a spaceship, a beacon, ...
but a satellite is something that orbits another body, not
something that goes from point A to point B.
On page 80, he says Dara is less than ten miles from Nisibis. This
is true, but the map on page 17 has them as far apart as it has
Milan and Naples, which is 450 miles.
On page 82, he writes how the most deadly weapon the Romans had
was "the compound bow that was the great contribution of the
steppe peoples to missile weaponry." Wrong! He means the
*composite* bow. The compound bow has pulleys and cables and
wasn't invented until 1966.
On page 126, Rosen say "mastery of Roman law had come to be
synonymous with mastery of the complications of the Latin
language--classical Latin regularly used six different cases in
the declension of nouns and adjectives: ablative, accusative,
dative genitive, nominative, and vocative. ... Simplifying the
practice of law so that its syntax and grammar were driven by
logic rather than arbitrary rhetorical conventions was clearly an
advance."
But the classical Latin language *was* driven by logic. English
has declensions as well, though only three cases, and applied only
to pronouns. "I" is subjective, "me" is objective, and "my" is
possessive. Should we get rid of two of them and say something
like, "Me want you to give me me book"? Modern Russian, like
Latin, has six cases; Finnish has fifteen. Yet little children
speak these languages, and their law codes don't see to suffer
from the apparent complexity.
So when he mentions three different strains of Y. pestis (one that
caused the sixth-century Plague of Justinian, one that caused the fourteenth-century Black Death, and one that caused the
nineteenth-century plague in China), I did double-check whether
this was accurate. It was.
At the end of the book, after detailing the effects of Justinian's
Plague, Rosen drifts into a bit of alternate history:
"One way to evaluate the significance of the sixth-century
plague--to weight Justinian's flea--is to examine any subsequent
century, asking whether it most prominent events would have
occurred at all, or in the same form, in the absence of the
pandemic. Consider the following:
"Muhammed, for example, would still have received his revelation
even if Y. pestis had never emerged out of Africa, but would
Persia and Rome have succumbed so easily had they not lost tens of
millions to the bacterium? ... And, even if the armies of Islam
would have defeated the two great empires of antiquity anyway,
would the Franks have become the preeminent power of the ninth
century without Charlemagne's acquisition of the title of Holy
Roman Emperor? The imperial crown was, after all, granted by a
pope who wanted Frankish protection from the Lombards, since he
could no longer count on a plague-weakened empire to defend Italy."
And so on.
PUBLIC SPECTACLES IN ROMAN AND LATE ANTIQUE PALESTINE by Zeev
Weiss (Harvard, ISBN 978-0-674-04831-7), on the other hand, is not
easy to read. Not only is there a lot of detail, complete with
measurements and terms in Latin, Greek, and other languages for
all the architectural details, ceremonies, and officials
(translated only on first use, if that, and no glossary). Weiss
also repeats stories four or five times--his explanation of why
Jews might be allowed to attend gladiatorial competitions, for
example (and not just refers to them, but repeats the entire
explanation).
It also has 239 pages of text, and 100 pages of notes. The notes
are both bibliographic references and explanatory notes, mixed
together. This is annoying--I generally want to read explanatory
notes (so they should be footnotes) but not the bibliographic
references (which are fine at the back of the book). [-ecl]
===================================================================
Evelyn C. Leeper
evelynchimelisleeper@gmail.com
Our life is frittered away by detail.
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!
--Henry David Thoreau
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