閉
Shut

A tiny Buddhist temple floats in the middle of a sparkling lake. Mountains soar above the lake, dwarfing the temple and the little canoe that serves as the only means of transport from the temple to the outside world.

Sounds charming, doesn't it? As Korean film Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring) unfolds, the scene only gets more beautiful. Inside the temple lives an old monk and his little apprentice. The child's room is a mat on the floor. The room has no walls- just a door that juts up incongruously from the floor, and through which the little apprentice dutifully exits upon waking.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring isn't technically a speculative fiction film, though a few miraculous things do occur. For instance, when the little apprentice steals the canoe and ventures alone to the mainland, the old monk mysteriously appears behind him. The old monk isn't even a little wet- leaving the viewer to wonder whether he has discovered teletransportation or just learned to walk on water.

The film traces the story of the young apprentice through the seasons of his life, from innocent child, through his sexual awakening, his disastrous excursion to the outside world, and his return to the floating temple. The cinematography and acting are moving- but I was not prepared to encounter anything in this seemingly mainstream film so creepy as 閉.

閉 is the Chinese character for "shut" or "closed." This symbol has become indelibly burned into my mind. It appears twice in the course of the story- and both times the wearer has written it on scraps of paper which have been glued firmly over the eyes, nose, ears, and mouth. The papers have been glued in place in an attempt to shut out the world from the five senses- and to shut off the supply of oxygen. The first time I saw a character plastered over with 閉s, I was terrified. Even my untrained Western gut reaction had no trouble identifying this very Eastern symbolic gesture as an attempt at suicide. Later in the movie, the symbols appear again. This time suffocation is not the only means by which the wearer of the 閉s attempts to achieve death.

The impact of these scenes are heightened by the fact that the film is largely unspoken. Writer/director Ki-duk Kim rarely uses dialog, relying on the actions of the actors to tell the story. This hardly means that language is unimportant to the tale. Carving the characters of a Buddhist sutra into the planks of the floating temple bring about a veritable miracle, and let us not forget the power of the word 閉.

You can see some still images of the film (including an actor pasted over with 閉) in the gallery of the film's website.

The Improbability Locus Theory

A few weeks ago I discussed Joe Haldeman and how his experiences in the Vietnam War influenced his writing (Camouflage: on Humanity's Coming of Age and the Importance of Adaptability)

Today I came across a short story by Haldeman: "The Private War of Private Jacob."

There are a lot of puns in this barely five-page story. The title is a good example. Another pun arises when the soldiers are talking about their sergeant- a man who has never once been hit in battle. Jacob proposes that the sergeant's good fortune is due to the "improbability locus theory." A fellow private jokes that Sergeant Melford "sure is an imperturbable locust." Soldiers facing very grim circumstances need to use humor as an escape.

Graveyard humor is one thing, but the way Sergeant Melford acts is something entirely different. Jacob has serious misgivings about the sanity of the overly cheerful sergeant, who laughs with genuine glee as he leads his men to their deaths.

So- what is this "improbability locus theory?" Is Haldeman just putting some fancy words into a Yatzee tumbler and seeing what comes out? I don't think so.

Try looking up luck on wikipedia. You'll find references to the locus of control. The locus of control has to do with how an individual feels his future will be determined- by external forces beyond his control, or by his own internal resources, and the conditions in which he chooses to live his life. As we learn in "The Private War of Private Jacob," Sergeant Melford's locus of control is a little more complex than we expected...

But on a much more literal level, Sergeant Melford is an "improbability locus" because battle, after battle, after battle, the men around him die, but he is never hit.

I found this short story particularly interesting, because it didn't read like science fiction. Oh, there were a few interesting weapons slid into the brutally realistic depiction of death and violence on the battlefield- but the story read like any mainstream war story. It isn't until Jacob's worst fears about himself are confirmed, that we really enter the realm of science fiction.

Concentration

Have you heard about the latest craze in reality TV? It's this show called Concentration. Contestants were chosen by lottery, then dragged off to a recreation of a Nazi concentration camp. The highlight of the broadcast is when the prisoners line up for review, and the weakest are chosen for the gas chamber.

Who is responsible for this inhumane fiasco? The prison guards who use the contestants for slave labor? Or the studio execs who thought up and financed Concentration?

No. Prissoner CKZ 114 was right. YOU are responsible for this program. You and every single viewer who tunes in to Concentration.

Fortunately, Concentration is not the brainchild of CBS- but of Amelie Nothomb writing her latest book, Acide Sulfurique. Though many of the francophone author's books have been translated into English ( Fear and Trembling , The Life of Hunger, and my personal favorite, The Life of Rain) those who don't speak French will have to wait a little while to read Acide Sulfurique.

In addition to studying with horrified fascination the public's participation in Concentration, Nothomb uses protagonist CKZ 114 to explore some themes familiar from her other novels: the power of beauty, the power of a name, and the ease with which an innocent girl can mistake herself for God.

For those who have been following Season One of Dr. Who in the U.S., you might remember that Part I of the final episode dealt with a theme similar to that of Acide Sulfurique. Each of the three main characters found themselves in the middle of deadly game shows. The Doctor was locked in a house in a Big Brother type show. Rose was playing the Weakest Link for her life. Captain Jack is getting a makeover with a chain saw.

Reality TV has become as prevalent in European culture as it has in America (when I lived in Italy Grande Fratello, the Italian version of Big Brother, was all the rage). Future extrapolations of reality TV, at least by European authors, tends to be very dark, indeed.

"Emergency Medical Hologram" May Be Less Futuristic Than You Think

This weekend I was playing around with Prolog- a logic programming language (developed for natural language processing) often used in artificial intelligence programs.

Now, my program wasn't very complicated. It was designed to help me choose which of three pair of shoes I wanted to buy.

The top portion of the program was dedicated to entering information about the shoes: their cost, what material they were made of, arch support, ease of washing, ect. The second portion was a set of rules and superrules.

The rules taught the program how to categorize the random bits of information. For instance- I taught the program that ecologically responsible shoes were not made of leather. Practical shoes are not too expensive, and can be washed. Comfortable shoes had good arch support. Cute shoes are blue or yellow, not black.

The superrules used the rules and detailed information to make value judgements. It learned to tell me that acceptable shoes met the criteria for ecologically responsibility and practicality. Optimal shoes meet the conditions of acceptable shoes and are also not too expensive (and possibly cute)!

That may seem like a lot of work for picking out your shoes. But just think of the enormous machines that filled the basements of universities- the original computers- which did with thousands of dollars and thousands of man hours what would take a calculator of the day no trouble to reproduce.

The power comes with what you can do with more complex questions. What if, for example, I was not trying to match shoes to my quirky wants and needs- but trying to match the bizarre symptoms of a patient to a disease?

Turns out this has already been done, using another logic programming language called Lisp. Mycin was developed in the 1970s to help doctors diagnose and treat rare blood diseases. According to wikipedia, Mycin's inference engine, loaded with information not unlike my standards for selecting shoes (though much more complex), accepted yes/no input from a long series of text questions, and then listed the likely bacterial interloper, complete with a list of other likely candidates ranked in order of its confidence in the diagnosis. Mycin outperformed general practice physicians in diagnosing these rare blood diseases, and held up pretty well against specialists in the field.

Mycin was the predecessor to CADUCEUS. CADUCEUS's amition was to diagnose more than blood diseases- extending to about 1,000 different internal medicine condtions.

So the "Emergency Medical Hologram" seen in Star Trek: Voyager wasn't as far out there as he seemed. We don't have any holograms that can wield a scalpel- but we do have artificial intelligence inference engines capable of flipping through every condition and symptom known to man, and making a guess at diagnosis and treatment.

I wouldn't want to give up my health insurance just yet- trained professionals will always be necessary to assess the patient and enter the symptoms, to review the findings, and administer treatment. But imagine what a difference such a system could make to a third world clinic staffed by one overworked doctor. Imagine how a system like CADUCEUS could help stumped doctors diagnose a condition with irregular symptoms. Imagine colonists far away from Earth, their physician killed, and decades left before the replacement will arrive.

The possibilities are endless...and they all begin with one little line of code.

New Studio Ghibli Convert

About ten birthdays ago I got these funny little white and grey bean bag creatures from a Japanese friend. She told me they were her favorite cartoon characters- and they sure were cute.

It wasn't until recently that I discovered what these little toys were. They are otedama: palm-sized bean bags that can be used for juggling or playing a traditional Japanese game. My particular otedama are very special. They are Chū and Chibi Totoro.

My husband wanted to see a Miyazaki film after hearing a screenwriter say that My Neighbor Totoro was his favorite film (and a good thing, since his kids wanted to watch it non-stop). We got a copy of My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro in Japanese), and I immediately fell in love with Miyazaki films.

Like all the greatest kids' books and films, My Neighbor Totoro appeals to both children and adults. Miyazaki uses the animated medium to reintegrate people of all ages with the sense of wonder that is our birthright as human beings. My otedama characters are tiny versions of the much larger Totoro- a sleepy forest spirit who wakes now and then to perform miracles like stirring the wind, turning seeds into trees, and helping little girls grow up.

If you have kids and they've never seen this film, watch it with them. If you don't have kids, watch it anyway!!

We were so impressed by Miyazaki and his production studio that we're eagerly seeking out and watching every film that has come from Studio Ghibli. A few of these films stand out as tremendous works of fantasy- so I'll be reviewing them in future entries.

Camouflage: on Humanity's Coming of Age and the Importance of Adaptability

The main title, Camouflage, is Joe Haldeman's. The secondary title is mine.

First let's talk about the actual title of Joe Haldeman's Nebula winning novel.

Here's what Webster's Online Dictionary has to say about camouflage:

1: the disguising especially of military equipment or installations
2 a : concealment by means of disguise b : behavior or artifice designed to deceive or hide

Camouflage begins like a classic, Crichtonesque thriller. For fans of nuts and bolts sf, fun physics and astrophysics facts abound, as not particularly well-characterized researchers go about trying to unlock the mysteries of an artifact found buried in the depths of the ocean. This fairly standard sf fare is made more intriguing by the "changeling," an immortal alien who presumably got its ride to Earth within the mysterious artifact. Third person omniscient narrating tells us that the "changeling" comes from a world of such harsh conditions, that it has learned to adapt to any environment- "not by natural selection, but by natural mutation." It can change the structure of its DNA-less body to adapt to any environmental conditions- extreme hot, extreme cold, bizarre chemical soup atmospheres, or no atmosphere at all. It can survive decapitation- when it is in a form that has a head. It can become a hammerhead shark, a beautiful woman, a floor tile, a TV set. It enjoys the taste of chlorine and gasoline.

After the "changeling" lands on Earth, it swims around in the ocean for a number of centuries, hanging out in the form of several kinds marine life. Then in 1931 it emerges on a California beach and makes its first attempt at taking human form. It soon finds that imitating the human body is a heck of a lot easier than imitating human behavior.

The story of Camouflage is the story of humanity's coming of age between the years 1931 and 2021. Haldeman, a Purple Heart Vietmam draftee, writes about the horrors of World War II as seen through the "changeling's" eyes when he is a Marine in the Bataan Death March of 1942. The Bataan experience is the "changeling's" induction to the human condition. From that point forward, the "changeling's" attempt to understand humanity reminds us just how fundametally the world has changed since the global crisis of World War II.

The first third of Camouflage is an exciting read, but I was frustrated by an inability to connect with the "changeling" protagonist. This is possibly the most ingenious part of the book: the "changeling" is not human, but gradually begins to take on some human characteristics. Its alien and predatory otherness slowly errodes, and as it is slowly surprised to find itself becoming more and more human, the reader gradually begins to have a grudging sort of empathy with it.

Empathy with the "changeling" is further heightened by its foil, the "chameleon." Like the "changeling," the "chameleon" is an immortal, adaptable being- but not quite so adaptable as the changeling. The "chameleon" can alter its appearance to look like a variety of human males, but is unable to become a woman or a non-living object. The "chameleon" war hops through hundreds of years of human history, always on the lookout for another being like itself. Unlike the "chameleon," he never drops his predatory, inhuman instincts.

The foil of the "changeling" and the "chameleon" seems to suggest that the more flexible and adaptable the creature, the better the possiblity for empathy and compassion with other beings. But which of the two models is best suited to survive? And how can humanity participate in the revolution of adaptability? Haldeman answers these question, but I don't want to spoil the exciting conclusion of the book for those who haven't read it.

If you look through the titles of Haldeman's books, you can begin to see a definite theme: The Forever War, Study War No More, Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds, War Stories, A Separate War, and let's not forget his debut 1972 short novel, War Year.

I don't mean to suggest that Haldeman is a one-note Johnny. My favorite Haldeman book, The Hemmingway Hoax, is caught up with a very different subject (a certain famous lost valise). But there's no denying that Haldeman's Vietnam experience informs his writing. Vietnam isn't just coloring the way he can describe the smell of miserable prisoners packed in a train and headed for slaughter- it makes up an important part of what he has to say. Camouflage asks big questions about humanity's develoment as a species since everything changed in World War II. What is the role of compassion in our survival as a species? How adaptable have we been and can we be to changing circumstances?

What does it mean to be human?

That's hardly a new question- but it's such a good one, that it seems worthwhile to keep asking it. The possible answers seem to be as varied and numerous as the men and women suggesting them.