Aha, I hadn’t spotted that in fact there is a second half of Neil Sykes’ Top 200 SF books list. They are:

Neil Sykes has revised his Top 100 SF novels listA Mirror for Obervers, which I admit I hadn’t heard of, and slightly more surprisingly Heinlein’s The Past Through Tomorrow, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, while in come Lem’s Solaris (reasonable), Ellison’s Deathbird stories (haven’t read them), Delany’s Dhalgren (also haven’t read it) and Niven and Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer (oh, for heaven’s sake!). The full list, with those I’ve read bold and those currently on my shelves awaiting my attention in italics, is:

7) The Complete Maus, by Art Spiegelman.

I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t read this before. It really is fantastic. Art Spiegelman persuades his elderly, cranky father to recount the experience of the Holocaust, in a series of graphic novels originally published between 1980 and 1991. The Jews are mice; the Germans are cats; the Poles are pigs; one French character is a frog. Which at first sounds as if he’s going for the worst stereotyping but in fact the moral comes out more as being to stress the shared humanity of all the participants. (At a couple of points Spiegelman interrupts the plot to reflect on the metaphor, but it still works.)

It’s a grim story, of course, enlivened by shafts of unexpected wit and individual moments of heroism. For me one of the grimmest aspects was to reflect that the last issue of Maus was published the year before Milosevic started down precisely the same road in Croatia and Bosnia. Strongly recommended.

This won’t mean much except to those who are at least as obsessed as I am with the US election campaign. But I thought it was amusing.

From Bush’s campaign manager to Kerry’s campaign manager:

Dear Ms. Cahill:

On Thursday your campaign hosted a fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall at which Sen. Kerry said, “Every performer tonight in their own way either verbally through their music through their lyrics have conveyed to you the heart and soul of our country.”

I called on your campaign to release the performance that Sen. Kerry said represented the “heart and soul” of America so that all Americans could see for themselves what John Kerry thinks represents the “heart and soul” of our country.

Do most Americans in their hearts, think that calling the President a “thug” and a “killer” represents the “heart and soul” of our nation? We don’t think so, but we think voters should decide for themselves by watching the celebrities John Kerry said captured the “heart and soul” of America.

Your Senior Advisor Tad Devine said that you believed that releasing musical performances “might violate copyrights and licensing agreements for the entertainers who performed and allow the Bush campaign to use the tape in commercials against Kerry and Edwards”

I have been assured that “fair use” rules of copyright would allow you to release the tapes of these musical performances to the news media under 2 U.S.C. § 107. To allay the other concern you relayed to the news media, Bush-Cheney ’04 pledges to refrain from using audio, video or transcripts of the event for any television, cable, satellite or radio advertising. We look forward to seeing this spirited display.

Sincerely,

Ken Mehlman

To which Kerry’s campaign manager sent a pretty good response:

Dear Ken:

Over the past several months, allies of the President have questioned John Kerry’s patriotism while your staff has criticized his service in Vietnam. Republicans and their allies have gone so far as to launch attacks against his wife and your campaign has run $80 million in negative ads that have been called baseless, misleading and unfair by several independent observers.

Considering that the President has failed to even come close to keeping his promise to change the tone in Washington, we find your outrage over and paparazzi-like obsession with a fund-raising event to be misplaced. The fact is that the nation has a greater interest in seeing several documents made public relating to the President’s performance in office and personal veracity that the White House has steadfastly refused to release. As such, we will not consider your request until the Bush campaign and White House make public the documents/materials listed below:

* Military records: Any copies of the President’s military records that would actually prove he fulfilled the terms of his military service. For that matter, it would be comforting to the American people if the campaign or the White House could produce more than just a single person to verify that the President was in Alabama when said he was there. Many Americans find it odd that only one person out of an entire squadron can recall seeing Mr. Bush.

* Halliburton: All correspondence between the Defense Department and the White House regarding the no-bid contracts that have gone to the Vice-President’s former company. Some material has already been made public. Why not take a campaign issue off the table by making all of these materials public so the voters can see how Halliburton has benefited from Mr. Cheney serving as Vice-President?

* The Cheney Energy Task Force: For an Administration that claims to hate lawsuits, it’s ironic that the Bush White House is taking up the Courts’ time to keep the fact that Ken Lay and Enron wrote its energy policy in secret behind closed doors. Please release the documents so that the country can learn what lobbyists and special interests wrote the White House energy policy.

* Medicare Bill: Please release all White House correspondence between the pharmaceutical industry and the Administration regarding the Medicare Bill, which gave billions to some of the President’s biggest donors. In addition, please provide all written materials that directed the Medicare actuary to withhold information from Congress about the actual cost of the bill.

* Prison Abuse Documents: A few weeks ago, the White House released a selected number of documents regarding the White House’s involvement in laying the legal foundation for the interrogation methods that were used in Iraq. Please release the remaining documents.

We also wanted to wish you a happy anniversary. As we are sure you and the attorneys representing the President, Vice-President and other White House officials are aware, today marks one year since Administration sources leaked the identity of a covert CIA agent to Bob Novak in an effort to retaliate against a critic of the Administration.

In light of the fact that the Administration began gutting the laws protecting the nation’s forests yesterday, we hope you will accept the paper on which this letter is written as an anniversary gift. (The one year anniversary is known as the “paper anniversary.”)

Sincerely,

Mary Beth Cahill
Campaign Manager

I spent a week in Macedonia with Mary Beth Cahill in 1997. She is one tough cookie.

Had a chance to leaf through Dean Godson’s massive biography of David Trimble yesterday. He quotes me extensively on pages 663-7 (for which he duly thanked me). I’m not completely content with the presentation; it’s often “Nicholas Whyte says…” followed by my analysis (accurately reported, in fairness) and then the next sentence is the author’s own intepretation, which I don’t always completely agree with. Oh well, if anyone gets far enough into the book to query it, they know where to find me…

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/arnold/article/0,9565,547796,00.html

The ones I’ve read in bold.

“These 25 must-read books, in alphabetical order, span the last 25 years of graphic novel making. All are still in print, and can be found at online bookstores and well-stocked retail outlets. This is not intended as a “best-of” list, as many excellent books could not be fit into a list of 25. Instead, it is meant as a guide for creating a well-rounded library of adult-level material that reflects the history, diversity and current trends of graphic literature.”

Berlin: City of Stones by Jason Lutes (Drawn & Quarterly; 2000)
Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Kim Deitch (Pantheon; 2002)
Buddha by Osamu Tezuka (Vertical, Inc.; 2003)
A Contract with God by Will Eisner (DC Comics; 1978)
The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller (DC Comics; 1986)
David Boring by Daniel Clowes (Pantheon; 2000)
Epileptic vol. I by David B. (L’Association; 2002)
Flood by Eric Drooker (Dark Horse Comics; 1992)
From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell (Top Shelf; 2000)
The Golem’s Mighty Swing by James Sturm (Drawn & Quarterly; 2002)
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware (Pantheon: 2000)
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District by Ben Katchor (Pantheon; 2000)
Louis Riel by Chester Brown (Drawn & Quarterly; 2003)
Maus vols. I + II by Art Spiegelman (Pantheon; 1986)
Nightmare Alley as adapted by Spain (Fantagraphics Books; 2003)
One! Hundred! Demons! by Lynda Barry (Sasquatch Books; 2002)
Our Cancer Year by Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner (Four Walls Eight Windows; 1994)
Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphics Books; 2003)
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon; 2003)
The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book by R. Crumb (Little Brown & Co.; 1997)
Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco (Fantagraphics Books; 2000)
Sandman: Season of Mists by Neil Gaiman and various (Vertigo; 1994)
Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse (DC Comics; 1995)
Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly; 2002)
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud (Perennial; 1993)

I’m woefully ill-read.

[later edit: since making this post I have read:
Persepolis
A Contract With God
Berlin: City of Stones
David Boring
Safe Area Goražde
Buddha, vol. 1
and enjoyed all apart from Buddha immensely, as indeed I did the five on the list I had originally read.]

Have seen 29, and bits of another 8, I think.

http://www.obeythefist.com/movies/index.php?list=worst

The only one I’ve seen was Highlander II – but boy oh boy, that was a bad film!

…by one of my least favourite paranoid ranters.

I amalgamated all my lists of books and came up with eight that I really want to buy and read by the end of this year, three non-genre classics, five sf classics:

Don Quixote, Cervantes; The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald; Little Women, Alcott; Way Station, Simak; The Demolished Man, Bester; City, Simak; The Door into Summer, Heinlein; Cyteen, Cherryh.

In London tomorrow – shopping!

6) A Narrative About War And Freedom: Dialog with the commander Ramush Haradinaj, by Bardh Hamzaj. This is basically an extended (180-page) interview with KLA leader Ramush Haradinaj, produced in mid-1999 very shortly after the end of the Kosovo conflict. Haradinaj gave me a personally inscribed copy last week, and I read it on the way to work this morning (I’m going to a party this evening so came in by public transport).

Points of interest:

• Haradinaj wanted to be an astronomer when he grew up! but circumstances turned him into a guerilla leader and then politician.
• His significant other is (or was) a Swedish-speaking Finn – they get everywhere!
• Ali Ahmeti appears at an early stage as helping with arms imports into Kosovo, but then drops out of the narrative. (I remember Haradinaj being questioned very closely on this point at a conference we were both at in Paris when Ahmeti emerged again in Macedonia in 2001.)
• KLA got no help at all from Albanian government structures, until late 1998 when the US clearly signalled that it was OK to turn a blind eye to gun-running across the border.
• Haradinaj thinks KLA had basically lost the war in September 1998 when Holbrooke brokered the deal to bring in the OSCE unarmed Kosovo Verification Mission, which gave them enough breathing space to regroup for the spring offensive which as it turned out was also backed by NATO. In fairness the Serbs breached the letter and spirit of the Holbrooke agreement much more egregiously.
• KLA had no central command structure at all. Various individuals were declared to be overall commanders at different times but this had no practical effect. This therefore made it difficult to negotiate even with allies like the Americans, never mind anyone else.
• Haradinaj very keen to stress importance of treating minorities decently – deplores summer 1999 violence against non-Albanians. It would be interesting to check if this is in the Albanian original text.

As with any such biography one wonders what is left out. But in the Balkans it’s unusual to read a story told by one of the key actors in the first person so soon after the events, with such a large amount of circumstantial detail.

I’ve just been invited to speak at a November event on the European constitution; the organisers very kindly write of my “impeccable credentials” and my “expertise on all thongs European.” I’d have thought that anyone with expertise in thongs probably does not have impeccable credentials, but perhaps I am not broad-minded enough.

By request from :

Finland is a more interesting country than you might think. It has a Swedish-speaking minority of around 5.5%, and I’ve got to know several of them through living in Brussels, particularly since the Swedish People’s Party in Finland is a rare example of a political party representing a minority which has decided that it is liberal in political orientation. The only other one I can think of offhand is the party of the ethnic Turks in Bulgaria. (I should explain that I’ve been loosely involved with international liberalism for over ten years.)

Also they seemed to be attracted to the same part of the world that I work on; a good friend who is a Swedish-speaking Finn working in the European Parliament has organised several conferences of Balkan liberals which I got invited to; their MEP takes a strong interest in Romania and a general interest in foreign policy; and one of their more senior members is on the board of trustees of my employers.

I know them well enough to be sensitive to the fact that they are emphatically not an ethnic minority, but a linguistic minority; they consider themselves to be ethnic Finns who happen to speak Swedish. And as someone who is Irish but cannot speak a word of the Irish language, who am I to criticise?

A few months ago, I found myself at a Brussels dinner sitting next to a gentleman who introduced himself as the former Prime Minister of the Åland Islands. I knew this much: that the Åland Islands are an autonomous archipelago between Stockholm and Turku/Åbo, owned by Finland, where the population speaks Swedish. So I shamelessly name-dropped my friends from the Swedish People’s Party of Finland, and finished off the process of (I thought) ingratiating myself by expressing my childhood fascination for that great writer of the Swedish-speaking Finns, Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins.

The ex-Prime Minister was not impressed. “They,” he said indignantly, “are Swedish-speaking Finns.” He saw my look of consternation, and took pity on me. “We,” he explained (and perhaps not for the first time, I sensed), “are Swedes under Finnish rule.”

(I thought Tove Jansson must be from the Åland Islands, because I knew she had lived on an island. The ex-Prime Minister pointed out kindly to me that there are a lot of other islands much nearer the Finnish coast than the Åland Islands are, and she lived on one of them.)

After that we got on quite well, but it was a shaky start. The moral is: no matter how much you think you know, you probably still don’t know enough. Or put more crisply: don’t be a smartarse when talking to ex-Prime Ministers about their own country.

Well, I’m sitting here listening to the CDs I bought in Kosovo (I’m sure all IPR were respected despite the fact that they cost a euro and a half each, though I didn’t interrogate the nice man in the shop who spoke German with such a very strong Swiss accent on this point), and trying as so often to persuade U to fall asleep on my lap.

Yesterday’s conference was a bit gruelling. As sometimes happens, I was supposed to both chair the session and make a presentation; to make matters more complex, the conference was being run through Serbian, Albanian and English with simultaneous translation via headphones, and also incidentally being broadcast live on TV. Also of course I hadn’t written my own presentation yet. So I asked the bright British diplomat on the panel to speak first, as I’d scanned his notes over dinner the previous night and knew what he was going to say, and then the former Central European foreign minister, who had already told me exactly what he was going to say already, since that would give me time to get my own notes together. Then I was able to listen more fully to the Serbian human rights activist (who spoke in Serbian) and the Kosovo journalist-turned-politician (who spoke in Albanian) and pull together a half-decent presentation myself on comparative situations outside Kosovo – not just the relatively local examples of Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina but also the cases of my birthplace and my current place of residence. I threw in a story about the Åland islands which sadly appeared to leave most of the audience cold (though at least my friends laughed – those who hadn’t heard it before).

So that was OK, and then came what Basil Fawlty would have called “the tricky bit”: moderating a discussion in three languages of which I only speak one. I only had to cut two people off because they were going on too long, one tedious individual who fancied himself an expert on constitutional law, and another who I actually felt really sorry for, an ethnic Turk from one of the small towns of Kosovo who complained that he and his people were getting screwed from all sides, Serbs, Albanians and international community, and he wasn’t even allowed to have his surname – Şahil – spelt properly on his identity card. I’m not at all unfamiliar with the problems of having your surname spelt correctly, and told him so afterwards (again in German, which is the unacknowledged second language of everyone in Kosovo), though I didn’t do so during the open session of the conference as I was afraid it would sound patronising.

Then a rapid dash to Pristina airport, in the company of Dr A, who has attended all three conferences I was at on this trip – Paris on Friday before last, Berlin on Saturday before last, and Kosovo yesterday and the day before. Dr A actually lives in Munich but commutes to Berlin, which must be a pain. We flew together to Budapest. I had the window seat and was thinking to myself that the sun was not where I expected, and there was a very large city much bigger than any city I knew to be north of Kosovo under the plane, when the truth hit me and I said to Dr A, “Are we flying over Skopje???” He confirmed that because of Serbia’s reluctance to recognise anything in Kosovo, flights north out of Pristina actually fly south, over Macedonia, and then turn round and head north over Bulgaria and Rumania, thus adding an extra half hour to the journey time.

So made it home in reasonably good order, and since then have been desultorily updating lj, cooking, playing with children, chat with neighbours (both J and his son have a leg in plaster at the moment) got out of house for a little shopping, read much but not yet all of River of Gods by Ian McDonald. But back to work tomorrow.

As so often, Dave Barry gets it right: “It turns out that an aquarium is a powder keg that can explode in deadly violence at any moment, just like the Middle East, or junior high school.”

OK, this site is fantastic. All the main campaign commercials for US presidential elections since 1952. Hear Gerald Ford’s voice break as he asks the American people to pray for him. Watch as President Johnson accuses Barry Goldwater of intending to kill children in a nuclear war. Cringe as George McGovern admits that one or two of Richard Nixon’s foreign policies are correct but he can’t understand the others. Fascinating.

Well, some of my entries from Friday seem to have been lost in the grand Chef 8 crash. One was a complaint about losing my lj’s style which had attracted comments from and , so presumably it will reappear in due course. The other was a books update, so I’ll replicate it here and delete the original if it ever rematerialises. All three books were from my infinity plus list so notes here are brief.

3) Newton’s Wake, by Ken MacLeod. ObLJ: dedicated to and . Enjoyed it, but not quite as much as I had hoped; the Balkan heat may have interfered with my concentration.

4) The Human Abstract, by George Mann. My expectations were low, but actually this is a good effort and my review will be largely positive.

5) Cartomancy by Mary Gentle. As it turns out I’d already read the two best stories here (one in another anthology and one on-line at infinity plus) but the others are at least acceptable and in some cases very good.

One of Saki’s last stories, “The Cupboard of the Yesterdays” shows him at his best and his worst. It’s a dialogue set in a London club during the 1912 Balkan War in a London club between the Wanderer, clearly meant to be the mouthpiece of the author himself, and the Merchant, representing the rest of society. The Wanderer loves the “picturesqueness and excitement” of war, regrets that “After every important war in South-East Europe in recent times there has been a shrinking of the area of chronically disturbed territory, a stiffening of the area of chronically disturbed territory, a stiffening of frontier lines, an intrusion of civilised monotony”, and fears that if the Turks lose (as they did) then the Balkans will no longer be “the last surviving shred of happy hunting-ground for the adventurous, a playground for passions that are fast becoming atrophied for want of exercise.” These are frankly horrible sentiments, and the best that can be said for the author in this respect is that he at least practiced what he preached, joined up in 1914, and was killed in action two years later.

But he gets two other aspects of the story exactly right. One is the difficulty of the Wanderer, who actually knows the region, in communicating what he knows about it to the Merchant, who does not. The unfortunate Merchant retreats further and further into incomprehension, as the Wanderer burbles on about the wild places he has been. It’s a scene I’ve seen (and, alas, perhaps participated in) all too often.

And the second point, oddly enough, is his vision of future history: “the Albanians, of course, we shall have with us still, a troubled Moslem pool left by the receding wave of Islam in Europe”; and his fear, which is my hope, that the Balkans will become boring: “Socialist Congress at Uskub, election riot at Monastir, great dock strike at Salonika, visit of the Y.M.C.A. to Varna” – Uskub is now Skopje, where yesterday I met with two leading members of the Social Democratic Union; Monastir is Bitola, where a friend of mine is a leading Liberal activist (and yesterday there was an election riot just down the road in Ohrid); Salonica is Thessaloniki, hub of northern Greece’s industrial politics; and Varna is indeed a centre for Bulgarian tourism (also the home town of our former au pair and my Bulgarian MP friend). The more the Balkans head that way, the better for all of us.

The Cupboard Of The Yesterdays

“War is a cruelly destructive thing,” said the Wanderer, dropping his newspaper to the floor and staring reflectively into space.

“Ah, yes, indeed,” said the Merchant, responding readily to what seemed like a safe platitude; “when one thinks of the loss of life and limb, the desolated homesteads, the ruined –”

“I wasn’t thinking of anything of the sort,” said the Wanderer; “I was thinking of the tendency that modern war has to destroy and banish the very elements of picturesqueness and excitement that are its chief excuse and charm. It is like a fire that flares up brilliantly for a while and then leaves everything blacker and bleaker than before. After every important war in South-East Europe in recent times there has been a shrinking of the area of chronically disturbed territory, a stiffening of the area of chronically disturbed territory, a stiffening of frontier lines, an intrusion of civilised monotony. And imagine what may happen at the conclusion of this war if the Turk should really be driven out of Europe.”

“Well, it would be a gain to the cause of good government, I suppose,” said the Merchant.

“But have you counted the loss?” said the other. “The Balkans have long been the last surviving shred of happy hunting-ground for the adventurous, a playground for passions that are fast becoming atrophied for want of exercise. In old bygone days we had the wars in the Low Countries always at our doors, as it were; there was no need to go far afield into malaria-stricken wilds if one wanted a life of boot and saddle and licence to kill and be killed. Those who wished to see life had a decent opportunity for seeing death at the same time.”

“It is scarcely right to talk of killing and bloodshed in that way,” said the Merchant reprovingly; “one must remember that all men are brothers.”

“One must also remember that a large percentage of them are younger brothers; instead of going into bankruptcy, which is the usual tendency of the younger brother nowadays, they gave their families a fair chance of going into mourning. Every bullet finds a billet, according to a rather optimistic proverb, and you must admit that nowadays it is becoming increasingly difficult to find billets for a lot of young gentlemen who would have adorned, and probably thoroughly enjoyed, one of the old-time happy-go-lucky wars. But that is not exactly the burden of my complaint. The Balkan lands are especially interesting to us in these rapidly-moving days because they afford us the last remaining glimpse of a vanishing period of European history. When I was a child one of the earliest events of the outside world that forced itself coherently under my notice was a war in the Balkans; I remember a sunburnt, soldierly man putting little pin-flags in a war-map, red flags for the Turkish forces and yellow flags for the Russians. It seemed a magical region, with its mountain passes and frozen rivers and grim battlefields, its drifting snows, and prowling wolves; there was a great stretch of water that bore the sinister but engaging name of the Black Sea — nothing that I ever learned before or after in a geography lesson made the same impression on me as that strangenamed inland sea, and I don’t think its magic has ever faded out of my imagination. And there was a battle called Plevna that went on and on with varying fortunes for what seemed like a great part of a lifetime; I remember the day of wrath and mourning when the little red flag had to be taken away from Plevna — like other maturer judges, I was backing the wrong horse, at any rate the losing horse. And now to-day we are putting little pin-flags again into maps of the Balkan region, and the passions are being turned loose once more in their playground.”

“The war will be localised,” said the Merchant vaguely; “at least every one hopes so.”

“It couldn’t wish for a better locality,” said the Wanderer; “there is a charm about those countries that you find nowhere else in Europe, the charm of uncertainty and landslide, and the little dramatic happenings that make all the difference between the ordinary and the desirable.”

“Life is held very cheap in those parts,” said the Merchant.

“To a certain extent, yes,” said the Wanderer. “I remember a man at Sofia who used to teach me Bulgarian in a rather inefficient manner, interspersed with a lot of quite wearisome gossip. I never knew what his personal history was, but that was only because I didn’t listen; he told it to me many times. After I left Bulgaria he used to send me Sofia newspapers from time to time. I felt that he would be rather tiresome if I ever went there again. And then I heard afterwards that some men came in one day from Heaven knows where, just as things do happen in the Balkans, and murdered him in the open street, and went away as quietly as they had come. You will not understand it, but to me there was something rather piquant in the idea of such a thing happening to such a man; after his dullness and his long-winded small-talk it seemed a sort of brilliant esprit d’escalier on his part to meet with an end of such ruthlessly planned and executed violence.”

The Merchant shook his head; the piquancy of the incident was not within striking distance of his comprehension.

“I should have been shocked at hearing such a thing about any one I had known,” he said.

“The present war,” continued his companion, without stopping to discuss two hopelessly divergent points of view, “may be the beginning of the end of much that has hitherto survived the resistless creeping-in of civilisation. If the Balkan lands are to be finally parcelled out between the competing Christian Kingdoms and the haphazard rule of the Turk banished to beyond the Sea of Marmora, the old order, or disorder if you like, will have received its death-blow. Something of its spirit will linger perhaps for a while in the old charmed regions where it bore sway; the Greek villagers will doubtless be restless and turbulent and unhappy where the Bulgars rule, and the Bulgars will certainly be restless and turbulent and unhappy under Greek administration, and the rival flocks of the Exarchate and Patriarchate will make themselves intensely disagreeable to one another wherever the opportunity offers; the habits of a lifetime, of several lifetimes, are not laid aside all at once. And the Albanians, of course, we shall have with us still, a troubled Moslem pool left by the receding wave of Islam in Europe. But the old atmosphere will have changed, the glamour will have gone; the dust of formality and bureaucratic neatness will slowly settle down over the time-honoured landmarks; the Sanjak of Novi Bazar, the Muerzsteg Agreement, the Komitadje bands, the Vilayet of Adrianople, all those familiar outlandish names and things and places, that we have known so long as part and parcel of the Balkan Question, will have passed away into the cupboard of yesterdays, as completely as the Hansa League and the wars of the Guises.

“They were the heritage that history handed down to us, spoiled and diminished no doubt, in comparison with yet earlier days that we never knew, but still something to thrill and enliven one little corner of our Continent, something to help us to conjure up in our imagination the days when the Turk was thundering at the gates of Vienna. And what shall we have to hand down to our children? Think of what their news from the Balkans will be in the course of another ten or fifteen years. Socialist Congress at Uskub, election riot at Monastir, great dock strike at Salonika, visit of the Y.M.C.A. to Varna. Varna — on the coast of that enchanted sea! They will drive out to some suburb to tea, and write home about it as the Bexhill of the East.

“War is a wickedly destructive thing.”

“Still, you must admit –” began the Merchant. But the Wanderer was not in the mood to admit anything. He rose impatiently and walked to where the tape-machine was busy with the news from Adrianople.

Right, almost done with this phase of the trip. Met with various Senior Officials ealier today, and tonight dinner with a number of old friends including the deputy prime minister (who is 32 and taking time out from her postgraduate studies in nuclear physics to serve in the government). Then tomorrow back north to Kosovo for another conference, and finally home on Saturday evening.

I must say it’s very heartening to be in a country where the peace process has been as successful as it is here; politicians from all sidesappear to have bought into it and even to win elections on it. So much more encouraging than certain other cases that come to mind.

So, we changed the schedule a bit and drove to Skopje from Pristina this evening.

There are a surprising number of teenagers in the outer suburbs of Skopje who know enough English to tell you the way to the Holiday Inn.

I’m going to bed now.

Hmm, maybe this is worth pursuing… (and then if I add some of these I might just do it again…)

Based on the lj interests lists of those who share my more unusual interests, the interests suggestion meme thinks I might be interested in
1. reading score: 15
2. writing score: 13
3. fantasy score: 12
4. music score: 11
5. books score: 11
6. computers score: 10
7. worldcon score: 9
8. anime score: 9
9. movies score: 9
10. dark fantasy score: 9
11. cats score: 8
12. comics score: 8
13. internet score: 7
14. conventions score: 7
15. ray bradbury score: 7
16. harry potter score: 7
17. photography score: 7
18. lord of the rings score: 6
19. london score: 6
20. horror score: 6

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Drove from Belgrade to Pristina yesterday. 360 km; I did 275, my colleague did 85 (though in fairness he did the worst bits of the road). Long stoppage at border as the guards were changing shifts.

Hot; slow internet connection; eight important meetings today, and the same tomorrow.

In Belgrade. Hot. Driving to Kosovo later.

So, my fourth capital in four days. At least tonight I will sleep in the same bed as last night…

SF NOVEL: Ilium, Dan Simmons – I liked this; I think it will also win the Hugo.
FANTASY NOVEL: Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold – liked it a lot.
FIRST NOVEL: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow – liked it a lot too.
YOUNG ADULT NOVEL: The Wee Free Men, Terry Pratchett – will wait for paperback.
NOVELLA: “The Cookie Monster”, Vernor Vinge – not so impressed but will probably win the Hugo.
NOVELETTE: “A Study in Emerald”, Neil Gaiman – much more impressed and it too will probably win the Hugo.
SHORT STORY “Closing Time”, Neil Gaiman – must look out for it.
COLLECTION: Changing Planes, Ursula K. Le Guin – liked this a lot.
ANTHOLOGY: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. – liked this too.
NONFICTION/ART: The Sandman: Endless Nights, Neil Gaiman, et al. – saw some less than overwhelmed reviews but maybe I’ll get it after all.

2) The Holy Machine by Chris Beckett. Another one of the books to review for infinity plus. A good one, too. Will save details for later, but I thought he got the Adriatic setting almost completely right and had a believable future world. Quite a different style from his short stories, but successful.

Berlin really gets to me. Walking across the Potsdamerplatz, I saw what I thought was a map board: but in fact it was a bit of Wall, placed on the line where the rest of it used to be. It´s extraordianry to realise that the Wall has been gone now for more than half as long as it was up – almost 15 years, compared to just over 28. I begin to appreciate what I didn´t when I was growing up and it seemed like a permanent fixture; that what hurt people was not so much that the Wall was there but that it hadn´t always been there. Someone who was my present age when the Wall came down would have been 9 years old when it was erected (and that was a full 16 years after the war ended).

If I´d had more time I´d have explored the new memorial usually referred to in English as the Holocaust Memorial but which the Germans more forthrightly describe as “The Monument to the Murdered Jews”. It´s round the corner from the “Topography of Terror” which combines a stretch of Wall with the remains of Gestapo headquarters. Unfortunately I won´t have time tomorrow but I must make time for it when I get back.

1) Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro, with six short stories never before collected, by A. J. Langguth.

H.H. Munro was born in 1870 and killed in the first world war in 1916. It´s striking that his best work was produced in a concentrated period between 1909 and 1913. (Unlike Douglas Adams, whose best stuff was written before he turned 30). The great short stories, “Tobermory”, “The Open Window”, “The Lumber Room”, “The Story-Teller”, and the two not-quite-so-great novels, The Unbearable Bassington and When William Came (set in a German-occupied England of the near future, say 1915 or so) all date from those years.

But Munro did a lot of other things too. He first achieved fame as a parliamentary sketch writer, poking fun at the Boer War, the Iraq of its day. But I’m obviously most interested in his two years as a Balkan correspondent from 1902 to 1904. He filed his first ever report from the town of Vučitrn, about the riots in Mitrovica, in October 1902. Oddly enough the first report I saw through to completion in my current job in June 2002 was also about riots in Mitrovica, and I expect to be in Vučitrn next Wednesday.

He doesn’t just cover the Balkans, but also Warsaw, St Petersburg and Paris, but I think it’s not just projecting my own sympathies to say that he liked the Balkans most. He liked Uskub, a very different place then from the Skopje I know and love and will be in again on Thursday. He got overwhelmed by the sheer wealth of intricate political information he was getting, to the point where he was unable to construct a coherent narrative; he became excessively reliant on official sources that took him into his confidence; he wasn´t so good on the graphic details or deeper social commentary. Of course I have always been immune from any such faults myself. Of course.

He notably drops the ball twice: when the King and Queen of Serbia are murdered in their bedroom, and their naked corpses flung out the palace window, he is in the next door country and only reaches Belgrade when it´s all over. (He can only report that people are still pointing out the window in question – as indeed they still do today.) Then on 31 July 1903 he decides that nothing much is happening in Macedonia, and goes on holiday. On 2 August the Ilinden rising begins, ending with the death of Goce Delčev in a blaze of glory and the crystallisation of Macedonian nationalism. Clearly his links with the local revolutionaries were not particularly good.

I remember hearing about this book when it was first published in 1981. It´s rather coy about Munro’s homosexuality, though I suspect it was probably rather daring for its time (immediately post Jeremy Thorpe). The biographer is fair I think to the two awful aunts who brought up Saki and his elder brother and sister after their mother was killed by a stampeding cow (in Devon, in 1872). I was also interested in the Irish connection – his brother Charles ended up as the governor of Mountjoy Prison in Dublin until 1922, and they used to have family holidays near Portstewart. And the biographer also manages to explain convincingly why someone of his particular talents and character should enlist in the army during the first world war and also resist promotion to the status of officer. His last words were “Put that bloody cigarette out!” Then a German sniper shot him.

The six new short stories are OK though not spectacular.