writes a passionate defence of blogging in general and livejournal in particular. Dead right. Having seen someone else’s post a day or so ago about how they had not really talked to anyone at WorldCon, I had already been reminded of how fortunate I was to bump into her and  on the first evening, and how we then found ourselves eating dinner at the next table to Terry Pratchett. She concludes, “…does LJ give me enough benefits to justify the amount of time I spend on it? No – it gives me more.” Indeed.

 links to a BBC article about our old school, noting that the reason the former convent is now part of the school is because there are almost no nuns left. In our day (and we both left over twenty years ago) there were only about six of them in residence; any of you folks (looking especially at , , , ) know how many there are now?

 links to an article from Salon.com about work. Indeed, she helpfully reproduces the entire text.”How did it become the norm to be exhausted, insecure and unhappy in your supposedly white-collar, middle-class or professional job?” In my experience, it’s more something we do to ourselves than something our bosses do to us. But maybe I’ve been fortunate. (Or maybe I’m deluded.)

F asked the other day, “Can princes fly?” (He’s been watching Disney’s Aladdin a lot recently). Of course our first response was, “No, in real life princes can not fly.” But then I reflected than in fact I do know one prince who does have a pilot’s licence (and indeed a degree in aerospace engineering). And then I remembered that my late second cousin did it the other way round, becoming an RAF pilot before he inherited the title of prince. So in fact the real answer to the question is, “Of course princes can fly, if they’ve passed the exams.” (And please, no need to talk of de Saint-Exupéry. His prince was fictional, and he himself was a mere count.)

I made an impulse purchase this morning. I’ve been irritated about the fact that when we got our fitted oven a couple of years ago, we forgot to get a grill pan for it, and anyway it isn’t really suited for grilling. But today I spotted this in the shop, and bought it along with two trout and the ingredients for a recipe from my Georgian cookbook. You put it on top of the stove and it grills whatever you want grilled. Worked like a dream, and the fish was yummy too.

I have a couple of eerie coincidences to share, but will leave that till tomorrow – I need to post a book review first.

So, the Commissioner’s speech-writer phoned me up, and said, “The Commissioner is going to Moldova next week. Do you have any good ideas for what she could put in her speech?”

“Well,” I said, “There’s always Dragostea din tei.”

(There followed a brief explanation, culminating in my finding an MP3 file on the internet and playing it down the phone at her.)

“Hmm,” she said at the end, “that might not entirely fit the Commissioner’s style. Any other ideas?”

“Well,” I said, “the poet Pushkin spent a short time in exile in Chişinău in the 1820s. You could always find some decent quote from him.”

So a week later, she sent me the Commissioner’s speech, which did indeed end with the glorious declamation:

After all, in the words of Alexander Pushkin, for whom Chişinău’s main street is named, “we’re destined…to cut a door to Europe wide”.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

This Delegation is part of your door to Europe.

And so it is with great pleasure that I hereby declare the Delegation of the European Commission to the Republic of Moldova open!

And I felt a little thrill of pride. So when my Moldovan friend took me out for lunch a couple of days after, I said to him, “Did you see the Commissioner’s speech when she was in Chişinău?”

His face hardened. “Yeah, she made a very strange remark about Pushkin. It went down rather badly.”

My plan to brag about my latest contribution to international understanding disintegrated. “What do you mean?”

My Moldovan friend explained. “First of all, she used a quote that is actually about St Petersburg. And second, Pushkin didn’t really like it in Moldova. He wrote that he felt like a lion among monkeys. It just seemed a little odd; I wonder who suggested it to her?”

I kept a discreet silence.

   1. Declare : A Novel by Tim Powers –  I like the author, and will look out for this.
   2. The Kif Strike Back by C.J. Cherryh –  I have been underimpressed by the author’s other books.
   3. Expiration Date : A Novel by Tim Powers –  
   4. Heir of Sea and Fire by Patricia A. McKillip –  Have never tried this author, but maybe it’s time I did.
   5. Chanur’s Venture by C.J. Cherryh –  
   6. Grass by Sheri S. Tepper –  I have read and enjoyed this book though for some reason it’s not in my Library Thing catalogue.
   7. The Pride of Chanur by C. J. Cherryh –  
   8. Harpist in the wind by Patricia A. McKillip –  
   9. The Sky Road by Ken MacLeod –  
  10. Life, the universe, and everything by Douglas Adams –  
  11. Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress –  I’ve read part of this book, and will look out for the full version.
  12. The hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy by Douglas Adams –  
  13. China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh –  
  14. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson –  
  15. Camber the Heretic by Katherine Kurtz –  
  16. The tough guide to fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones –  
  17. Diaspora by Greg Egan –  
  18. The Illearth War by Stephen R. Donaldson –  I have read this book but wasn’t really overwhelmed.
  19. Dragonquest by Anne Mccaffrey –  
  20. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams –  
  21. Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson –  
  22. The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers –  
  23. Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds –  
  24. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams –  
  25. Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks –  
  26. The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin –  
  27. Camber of Culdi by Katherine Kurtz –  
  28. Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers –  
  29. Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke –  
  30. The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper – 
  31. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip – 
  32. Little, Big by John Crowley – 
  33. White Gold Wielder by Stephen R. Donaldson –  
  34. The book of night with moon by Diane Duane – 
  35. Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey –  
  36. Saint Camber by Katherine Kurtz –
  37. Parable of the sower by Octavia E. Butler –
  38. The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett –
  39. Deryni checkmate by Katherine Kurtz –
  40. Deryni rising by Katherine Kurtz –
  41. Jingo by Terry Pratchett –  
  42. All the Weyrs of Pern by Anne McCaffrey –
  43. The white dragon by Anne McCaffrey –  
  44. A swiftly tilting planet by Madeleine L’Engle –  
  45. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams –  
  46. Silver on the tree by Susan Cooper – 
  47. The One Tree by Stephen R. Donaldson –  
  48. The hero and the crown by Robin McKinley – 
  49. The amber spyglass by Philip Pullman –
  50. Soul Music by Terry Pratchett –
  51. The last unicorn by Peter S. Beagle – 
  52. Hogfather by Terry Pratchett –
  53. Zodiac by Neal Stephenson –
  54. The Power that Preserves by Stephen R. Donaldson –  
  55. 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke –
  56. The lathe of heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin –
  57. The grey king by Susan Cooper – 
  58. Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers –
  59. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett –
  60. Over sea, under stone by Susan Cooper – 
  61. Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams –  
  62. The man in the high castle by Philip K. Dick –
  63. Dune messiah by Frank Herbert –  
  64. Greenwitch by Susan Cooper – 
  65. Pyramids by Terry Pratchett –
  66. The illustrated man by Ray Bradbury –
  67. Pawn of prophecy by David Eddings –  
  68. Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett –
  69. The Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea –
  70. Maskerade by Terry Pratchett –
  71. The fellowship of the ring by J. R. R. Tolkien –
  72. Going Postal by Terry Pratchett –
  73. Dragonsinger by Anne McCaffrey –
  74. Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett –
  75. The name of the rose by Umberto Eco –
  76. Robots and Empire by Isaac Asimov –  
  77. Dandelion wine, a novel by Ray Bradbury –
  78. Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey –
  79. Programming Perl by Larry Wall –  it’s most unlikely that I’ll ever want or need to read this
  80. A Brief History of Time by Stephen W. Hawking –
  81. A wind in the door by Madeleine L’Engle –
  82. Queen of Sorcery by David Eddings –  
  83. Watership Down by Richard Adams –
  84. The eye of the world by Robert Jordan – 
  85. Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett –
  86. The moon is a harsh mistress by Robert A. Heinlein –
  87. Xenocide by Orson Scott Card –  I’ve been advised not to bother with his novels after “Speaker for the Dead”
  88. Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian –
  89. The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien –
  90. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein –
  91. Sourcery by Terry Pratchett –
  92. The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien –
  93. The golden compass by Philip Pullman –
  94. Harry Potter and the sorcerer’s stone by J. K. Rowling –
  95. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke –

Not a bad strike rate. I should get rid of books I own but don’t actually like, that would certainly improve the strike rate of the recommendations!

[Edited to add: I discovered that I’d left one shelf uncatalogued – and four of these books were on it!]

Thanks to Thammy’s book, I found out (what I should have known), that “T’Ga Za Jug”, as well as being the name of a decent Macedonian wine and an atmospheric restaurant in Skopje, is also a famous poem about being homesick, written by the poet Konstantin Miladinov while he was studying in Moscow. Here it is:

As so often with translated poetry, the English is pretty clunky but gets the idea across. (I used mostly this version by Graham Reid, but took the last two lines from here.) It would be interesting to see what someone who could actually write poetry could do with it.

Seems a bit grim to have put obituaries up so often recently, but I just wanted to note the passing of Matti Wuori, former MEP, and adviser of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He helped me out a bit on Montenegro once, and I had a good chat with him in 2002. He looked pretty ill then, and I would have put his age at ten years older than he really was.

Jeepers, that was impressive for Cameron, and pretty disastrous for Davis.

I see Cameron is also a fan of my favourite country. Unfortunately as a bizarre outworking of the Ukrainian revolution they won’t get invited to join NATO until 2008. I shall write more about this on Tuesday.

The foreign minister was sacked yesterday, after a blisteringly negative resolution about her performance was passed by the Georgian parliament. Interestingly, she was serving on secondment from the French foreign ministry. But she’s now resigned her French position and has declared her intention to pursue a political career in Georgia. Inevitably, the conspiracy theories are already flying, with one of the opposition party leaders alleging that the sinister hand of the Russians is behind it all. Meanwhile the speaker of parliament expressed her surprise that the foreign minister wasn’t sacked sooner…

As pioneered by :

Bold I’ve read, Italic I’ve got but haven’t read. Yet. And underlined authors means I’ve read a different book by them.

The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren
American Pastoral – Philip Roth
An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Appointment in Samarra – John O’Hara
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret – Judy Blume
The Assistant – Bernard Malamud
At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O’Brien
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Beloved – Toni Morrison
The Berlin Stories – Christopher Isherwood
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
The Bridge of San Luis Rey – Thornton Wilder
Call It Sleep – Henry Roth
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
The Confessions of Nat Turner – William Styron
The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
A Dance to the Music of Time – Anthony Powell
The Day of the Locust – Nathaniel West
Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather
A Death in the Family – James Agee
The Death of the Heart – Elizabeth Bowen
Deliverance – James Dickey
Dog Soldiers – Robert Stone
Falconer – John Cheever
The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
Go Tell it on the Mountain – James Baldwin
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene
Herzog – Saul Bellow
Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson
A House for Mr. Biswas – V.S. Naipaul
I, Claudius – Robert Graves
Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Light in August – William Faulkner
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkein
Loving – Henry Green
Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
The Man Who Loved Children – Christina Stead
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Money – Martin Amis
The Moviegoer – Walker Percy
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
Native Son – Richard Wright
Neuromancer – William Gibson
Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
1984 – George Orwell
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
The Painted Bird – Jerzy Kosinski
Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
Play It As It Lays – Joan Didion
Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
Possession – A.S. Byatt
The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
Rabbit, Run – John Updike
Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
The Recognitions – William Gaddis
Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates
The Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles
Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson
The Sot-Weed Factor – John Barth
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
The Sportswriter – Richard Ford
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold – John LeCarre
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
Ubik – Philip K. Dick
Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
Watchmen – Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
White Noise – Don DeLillo
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

In one of the more unusual instances of my diverse interests suddenly converging, someone has just emailed me to ask if I can identify an Albanian to English translator in Belfast for next weekend (Friday to Sunday). I can’t. Anyone got any suggestions?

If consistency is the hob-goblin of little minds, does than mean that inconsistency is the elf-maiden of galactic consciousnesses?

6) Accelerando, by

The complete sequence of nine stories in Charles Stross’s series about the Singularity And After originally published in Asimov’s. As a diligent reader of Hugo-nominees, I had in fact read four of these nine stories before – “Lobsters”, “Halo”, “Nightfall” and “Elector”, respectively nominated for Hugo awards in 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005, and being stories #1, #4, #6 and #8 in the sequence. Now we have all nine together between one set of covers, mildly revised and tightened up (so the author assures us). As I’ve said in previous reviews (linked to by year of nomination), I found them so full of ideas that they were a little difficult for me to absorb. Having them all together as a unit does help.

A few things jump out at me that didn’t hit me on first reading. First of all, family is very important; the three generations of Manfred -> Amber -> Sirhan are faintly reminiscent of Abraham -> Isaac -> Jacob. Big differences too, obviously, but the “founding family” myth is there. Second, Charlie’s language at his best is reminiscent of early Zelazny at his best. I’ve recently been reading Samuel R Delany’s essay on Zelazny and Disch, and it’s sort of weird – people were saying about RZ forty years ago what they say about CS today. And finally, I have realised that, of course, the “EU politician” mentioned in “Elector” is in fact Gianni from the previous stories, not (as I had bemusedly surmised) a completely new character meant to be in some way satirical.

Anyway, good stuff, headed for a decent result in next year’s Hugo ballot I expect…

If you can see this, you are one of a number of people who I am sending my contact details to, just so as you have them. I’m doing this via Plaxo’s address management sytem, which I’ve found to be pretty reliable and satisfactory, provided you use it carefully. If you should choose to reply to the Plaxo email with your own contact details (in some cases, I’m checking that I have them right) well, that would be great.

(If you don’t receive any email from Plaxo, and you can read this anyway, then something has gone wrong with my careful selection of recipients, or else your email system has simply filed the Plaxo update request as spam. Heigh ho.)

{Edited to add: Well, having looked at this thread, there’s obviously a couple of people to take off the list…]

Thanks, everyone, for your suggestions as to which Nobel laureate in literature I should try next. I may be able to return the favour by saying a little bit about Ivo Andrić, the Yugoslav writer of Bosnian Croat origin who won the prize in 1961, since I seem to be the only person of those who I’ve seen doing the meme who has actually read him.

I’ve read two books by Andrić, The Damned Yard, which is a collection of short stories, and Bridge on the Drina, probably his best known novel. The latter is a series of vignettes of the history of Višegrad and the bridge which links and separates the Serbs and Muslims of the town and their rulers, really great stuff once you get past the impaling in an early chapter. The former shows him at his best, in short stories; one in particular made a strong impression on me when I first read it – more on that in a moment. Also I picked up In The Days Of The Consuls, set in his native Travnik, when I was in Serbia a couple of weeks ago and it’s on my “to read” shelf.

Andrić does have the typical problem of the guy from a country background who migrated to the metropolis at an early stage and developed a condescension towards his original environment. In particular, his frequent portrayal of Bosnian Muslims as primitive “Turks” doesn’t go down well these days with the Bosniaks who fought a war to preserve their concept of a multi-ethnic state. I dunno myself; I grew up with people insisting that Northern Ireland used to be a “great wee place” before the Troubles, an earthly paradise where nothing went wrong. I heard a lot of that sort of talk when I was in Bosnia, and found Andrić a useful corrective.

The short story “Letter from 1920”, which is in the Damned Yard collection, is about Max Levenfeld, an old friend of the unnamed narrator; they bump into each other unexpectedly while changing trains in Slavonski Brod, and then Levenfeld (who is a Sarajevo Jew by origin) writes to the narrator to explain why he is leaving Bosnia for ever. The climactic passage, describing the different mental time zones of the different people of Sarajevo, reads now like a chilling prophecy of what was to come. (Someone once told me that Andrić originally intended to give the story the title “Letter from 1990”, but that sems to me too good to be true.) It should be read, of course, not as a definitive statement of the author’s own views but as a portrayal of the world-view of a fictional character.

My dear old friend,

When we ran into one another in Slavonski Brod our conversation was disjointed and difficult. And even had we had a far better occasion and more time, I don’t believe we would have understood one another and got to the bottom of everything. The unexpected meeting and abrupt departure made that quite impossible. I’m getting ready to leave Trieste where my mother is living. I’m going to Paris, where I have some relatives on my mother’s side. If they’ll allow me, as a foreigner, to practise medicine there, I’ll stay in Paris; if not, I’m truly going to South America.

I don’t believe that these few disjointed paragraphs I am writing in haste will be able to explain the matter fully, or justify in your eyes my “running away” from Bosnia. But I send them anyway, because I feel I owe you an answer, and remembering our school-days. I don’t want you to misunderstand me and see in me an ordinary Kraut and “carpetbagger” who lightly leaves the country he was born in, the moment she is beginning a free life and needs every ounce of her strength.

But let me come straight to the point. Bosnia is a wonderful country, fascinating, with nothing ordinary in the habitat or people. And just there are mineral riches under the earth in Bosnia, so undoubtedly are Bosnians rich in hidden moral values, which are more rarely found in their compatriots in other Yugoslav lands. But, you see, there’s one thing that the people of Bosnia, at least people of your kind, must realise and never lose sight of- Bosnia is a country of hatred and fear.

But leaving fear aside, which is only a correlative of hatred, the natural result of it, let us talk about hatred. Yes, about hatred. And instinctively you recoil and protest when you hear that word ( I saw it that night at the station), just as every one of you refuses to hear, grasp, and understand it. But it is precisely this that needs to be recognised, confirmed, and analysed. And the real harm lies in the fact that no one either wants or knows how to do it. For the fatal characteristic of this hatred is that the Bosnian man is unaware of the hatred that lives in him, shrinks from analysing it and – hates everyone who tries to do so. And yet it’s a fact that in Bosnia and Herzegovina there are more people ready in fits of this subconscious hatred to kill and be killed, for different reasons, and under different pretexts, then in other much bigger Slav and non-Slav lands.

I know that hatred, like anger, has its function in the development of society, because hatred gives strength, and anger provokes action. I know that there are ancient and deeply rooted injustices and abuses which only torrents of hatred and anger can uproot and wash away. And when these torrents dwindle and dry up, room for freedom remains, for the creation of a better life.

The people living at the time see the hatred and anger far better, because they are the sufferers by them, but their descendants see only the fruits of this strength and action. That I know well. But what I have seen in Bosnia – that is something different. It is hatred bat not limited just to a moment in the course of social change, or an inevitable part of the historical process; rather, it is hatred acting as an independent force, as an independent force as an end in itself. Hatred which sets man against man and casts both alike into misery and misfortune, on drives both opponents to the grave; hatred like a cancer in an organism, consuming and eating up everything around it, only to die itself at the last; because this kind of hatred, like a flame, has neither one constant form, nor a life of its own: it is simply the agent of the instinct of destruction or self destruction. It exists only in this form, and only until its task of total destruction has been completed. Yes, Bosnia is a country of hatred.

That is Bosnia. And by strange contrast, which in fact isn’t so strange, and could perhaps be easily explained by careful analysis, it can also be said that there are a few countries with such firm belief, elevated strength of character, so much tenderness and loving passion, such depth of feeling, of loyalty and unshakeable devotion, or with such a thirst for justice. But in secret depths underneath all this hide burning hatreds, entire hurricanes of tethered and compressed hatreds maturing and awaiting their hour.

The relationship between your loves and your hatred is the same as between your high mountains and the invisible geological strata underlying them, a thousand times larger and heavier. And thus you are condemned to live on deep layers of explosive which are lit from time to time by the very sparks of your loves and your fiery and violent emotion. Perhaps your greatest misfortune is precisely that you do not suspect just how mach hatred there is in your loves and passions, traditions and pieties. And just as, under the influence of atmospheric moisture and warmth, the earth on which we live passes into our bodies and gives them colour and form, determining the character and direction of our way of life and our actions – so does the strong, underground and invisible hatred on which Bosnia man lives, imperceptibly and indirectly enter into all his actions, even the best of them. Vice gives to hatred everywhere in the world, because it consumes and does not create, destroys, and does not build; but in countries like Bosnia, virtue itself often speaks and acts through hatred. With you, ascetics derive no love from their asceticism, but hatred for the voluptuary instead., abstainers hate those who drink, and drunkards feel a murderous hatred for the whole world.

Those who do believe and love feel a mortal hatred for those who don’t, or those who believe and love differently. And unhappily, the chief part of their belief and love is often consumed in this hatred. (The most evil and sinister-looking faces can be met in greatest numbers at places of worship – monasteries, and dervish tekkes.) Those who oppress and exploit the economically weaker do it with hatred into the bargain, which makes that exploitation a hundred times harder and uglier; while those who bear these injustices dream of justice and reprisal, but as some explosion of vengeance which, if it were realised according to their ideas, would perforce be so complete that it would blow to pieces the oppressed along with the hated oppressors.

You Bosnians have, for the most part, got used to keeping all the strength of your hatred for that which is closest to you. Your holy of holiest is, as a rule, three hundred rivers and mountains away, but the objects of your repulsion and hatred are right beside you, in the same town, often on the other side of your courtyard wall. So your love remains inert, but your hatred is easily spurred into action. And you love your homeland, you passionately love it, but in three or four different ways which are mutually exclusive, often come to blows, and hate each other to death.

In some Maupassant story there is a Dionysiac description of spring which ends with the remark that on such days, there should be a warning posted on every corner: “Citizens! This is spring-beware of love!” Perhaps in Bosnia men should be warned at every step in their every thought and their every feeling, even the most elevated, to be beware of hatred – of innate, unconscious, endemic hatred. Because this poor, backward country, in which four different faiths live cheek by jowl, needs four times as much love, mutual understanding and tolerance as other countries.

But in Bosnia, on the contrary, lack of understanding, periodically spilling over into open hatred, is the general characteristic of its people. The rifts between the different faiths are so deep that hatred alone can sometimes succeed in crossing them. I know that you could argue, and with sufficient reason, that a certain amount of progress can be seen in this direction., that the ideas of the nineteenth century have done their work here too, and after liberation and unification all this will go much better and faster. I’m afraid that this is not quite so. (In these past few months I think I have had a good view of the real relationships between people of different faiths and nationalities in Sarajevo!) On every occasion you will be told, and wherever you go you will read, “Love your brother, though his religion is other”, “It’s not the cross that marks the Slav”, “Respect others’ ways and take pride in your own”, “Total national solidarity recognises no religious or ethnic differences”.

But from time immemorial in Bosnian urban life there has been plenty of counterfeit courtesy, the wise deception of oneself and others by resounding words and empty ceremonies. That conceals the hatred up to a point, but doesn’t get rid of it or thwart its growth. I’m afraid that in these circles, under the cover of all these contemporary maxims, old instincts and Cainlike plans may only be slumbering, and will live on until the foundations of material and spiritual life in Bosnia are altogether changed. And when will that time come, and who will have the strength to carry it out? it will come one day, that I do believe; but what I’ve seen in Bosnia does not indicate that things are advancing along that path at present. On the contrary.

I have thought this over and over, especially in the last few months, when I was still struggling against my decision to leave Bosnia for ever. Of course a man obsessed with such thoughts cannot sleep well, and I would lie in front of an open window in the room where I was born, while the sound of the Miljacka alternated with the rustling of the leaves in the early autumn wind.

Whoever lies awake at night in Sarajevo hears the voices of the Sarajevo night. The clock on the Catholic cathedral strikes the hour with weighty confidence: 2 AM. More than a minute passes (to be exact, seventy-five seconds – I counted) and only then with a rather weaker, but piercing sound does the Orthodox church announce the hour, and chime its own 2 AM. A moment after it the tower clock on the Beys’ mosque strikes the hour in a hoarse, faraway voice, and that strikes 11, the ghostly Turkish hour, by the strange calculation of distant and alien parts of the world. The Jews have no clock to sound their hour, so God alone knows what time it is for them by the Sephardic reckoning or the Ashkenazy.

Thus at night, while everyone is sleeping, division keeps vigil in the counting of the late, small hours, and separates these sleeping people who, awake, rejoice and mourn, feast and fast by four different and antagonistic calendars, and send all their prayers and wishes to one heaven in four different ecclesiastical languages. And this difference, sometimes visible and open, sometimes invisible and hidden, is always similar to hatred, and often completely identical with it. This uniquely Bosnian hatred should be studied and eradicated like some pernicious, deeply-rooted disease.

Foreign scholars should come to Bosnia to study hatred, were only recognised as a separate, classified subject of study, as leprosy is. I considered whether I should devote myself to the study of this hatred and, by analysing it and bringing it to the of day, make my contribution to its destruction. Perhaps I was in duty bound to try, since, although a foreigner by birth, it was in Bosnia I first “saw the light of day”, as they say. But after my first attempts and much reflection, I realised I had neither the strength nor the ability to do it. I would be required to take sides, to hate and be hated; and that I neither wanted nor was able to do. Perhaps, if it had to be, I could have consented to fall a victim to hatred; but to live in hatred and with hatred, to be a part of it- that I can not do.

And in country like present-day Bosnia, the man who does not know how to hate or, what is still better and harder, consciously does not want to hate, is always something of a foreigner and freak, often a martyr. That holds true for all you who are born in Bosnia, and even more so for a newcomer. And so on one of those autumn nights listening to the strange chimes of the various and many-voiced Sarajevo towers, I concluded that I could not stay in Bosnia, my second home land, and did not have to. I’m not so naive as to look for any town in the world that has no hatred. No, I only need a place where I shall be able to live and work. Here, I would not be able to. You may now repeat your remark about my running away from Bosnia with mockery, perhaps even with contempt. This letter of mine won’t have the power to explain and justify my action to you, but it appears that there are occasions in life when the ancient Latin maxim non est salus nisi in fuga holds true. I beg you to believe one thing only: I am not running away from my duty as a man, but only attempting to perform it more completely, without hindrance. I wish you and our Bosnia the best of luck in its independent life in the new state.

Yours, M.L.

Not so much the description of Sarajevo, but the rationalisation for emigration, made a particular impression on me because at the time I first read it I was personally wrestling with the question of whether I would return to Northern Ireland after working in Bosnia. I had invested a great deal of my own time and intellectual capital in my political work with the Alliance Party, and I do love the place in general; and, as with Andrić’s Bosnia of 1920, big political changes which would certainly open up many new possibilities were on the way (this was in 1997). But I felt increasingly that I couldn’t go back, that having dipped my toes in the river of international politics I couldn’t returned a life of fighting occasionally successful elections in Newtownabbey, leavened by the odd foreign trip; I wanted something a bit more substantial. Yet this feeling did feel like a sort of betrayal, and Andrić’s story crystallised it for me. So it was an important point in the thought processes that led me to where I am today.

Thanks to Ken MacLeod for reporting that today’s editorial in The Sun is worried about “Sunni Iran” and “oil hungry Teheran” as causes of instability in Iraq. As Ken says, “I’ll say this for The Sun, it gives you information won’t find anywhere else.”

I got to wondering the other day, as yet another news item about avian flu was on the radio, how come we don’t hear so much about the celebrity victims of the 1918 flu pandemic? I mean, we can all name numerous victims of AIDS at the drop of a hat, from Isaac Asimov to Freddie Mercury.

So, to follow up my ground-breaking research on government officials killed when their own cannons blew up, here is a list of more or less famous people who did die in the great pandemic. I confess I had heard of only one of them, Egon Schiele, but the others all seem respectable enough. (Noticeable how young most of them were – the bug hit the 20-40 age range particularly hard.)

I’ve added most of them to the relevant Wikipedia entry, except the two Tongan ladies about whom more research is needed.

• Guillaume Apollinaire, French surrealist poet.
• Felix Arndt, American composer.
• Randolph Bourne, American political thinker.
• Anton Dilger, ironically in charge of German biological warfare in the first world war.
• Henry G. Ginaca, American inventor.
• Myrtle Gonzalez, American actress.
• Hans E. Lau, Danish astronomer.
• Harold Lockwood, American actor.
• Edmond Rostand, French poet and dramatist.
• Egon Schiele, Austrian artist.
• Reggie Schwarz, South African cricketer.
• Queen ‘Anaseini Takipo, third wife of King George Tupou II of Tonga.
• Tupou Moheofo Tupou, mistress of King George Tupou II of Tonga.
• William Walker, British diver.
• King Watzke, New Orleans bandleader.

There, that feels enlightening!

[Edited to add: Hah, I see the editors of the German version already had the same idea. I can nick some of their names then.]

From , and a few others by now:

Writers I’ve read (or seen a play by). Writers I haven’t read but have at least heard of.

2005 Harold Pinter
2004 Elfriede Jelinek
2003 J.M. Coetzee
2002 Imre Kertesz
2001 V.S. Naipaul
2000 Gao Xingjian
1999 Gunter Grass
1998 Jose Saramago
1997 Dario Fo
1996 Wislawa Szymborska
1995 Seamus Heaney
1994 Kenzaburo Oe
1993 Toni Morrison
1992 Derek Walcott
1991 Nadine Gordimer
1990 Octavio Paz
1989 Camilo Jose Cela
1988 Naguib Mahfouz
1987 Joseph Brodsky
1986 Wole Soyinka
1985 Claude Simon
1984 Jaroslav Seifert
1983 William Golding
1982 Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1981 Elias Canetti
1980 Czeslaw Milosz
1979 Odysseus Elytis
1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer
1977 Vicente Aleixandre
1976 Saul Bellow
1975 Eugenio Montale
1974 Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson
1973 Patrick White
1972 Heinrich Boll
1971 Pablo Neruda
1970 Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
1969 Samuel Beckett
1968 Yasunari Kawabata
1967 Miguel Angel Asturias
1966 Samuel Agnon, Nelly Sachs
1965 Mikhail Sholokhov
1964 Jean Paul Sartre
1963 Giorgios Seferis
1962 John Steinbeck
1961 Ivo Andric
1960 Saint-John Perse
1959 Salvatore Quasimodo
1958 Boris Pasternak
1957 Albert Camus
1956 Juan Ramon Jimenez
1955 Halldor Laxness
1954 Ernest Hemingway
1953 Winston S. Churchill
1952 Francois Mauriac
1951 Par Lagerkvist
1950 Bertrand Russell
1949 William Faulkner
1948 T.S. Eliot
1947 Andre Gide
1946 Hermann Hesse
1945 Gabriela Mistral
1944 Johannes V. Jensen
1939 Frans Eemil Silanpaa
1938 Pearl Buck
1937 Roger Martin du Gard
1936 Eugene O’Neill
1934 Luigi Pirandello
1933 Ivan Bunin
1932 John Galsworthy
1931 Erik Axel Karlfeldt
1930 Sinclair Lewis
1929 Thomas Mann
1928 Sigrid Undset
1927 Henri Bergson
1926 Grazia Deledda
1925 George Bernard Shaw
1924 Wladyslaw Reymont
1923 William Butler Yeats
1922 Jacinto Benavente
1921 Anatole France
1920 Knut Hamsun
1919 Carl Spitteler
1917 Karl Gjellerup and Henrik Pontoppidan
1916 Verner von Heidenstam
1915 Romain Rolland
1913 Rabindranaqth Tagore
1912 Gerhart Hauptmann
1911 Maurice Maeterlinck
1910 Paul Heyse
1909 Selma Lagerlof
1908 Rudolf Eucken
1907 Rudyard Kipling
1906 Giosue Carducci
1905 Henryk Sienkiewicz
1904 Frederic Mistral, Jose Echegaray
1903 Bjornstjerne Bjornson
1902 Theodor Mommsen
1901 Sully Prudhomme

So who should I try next?

Travel meme from , sorry, here:

You’ll need an atlas. This astrologer’s atlas is at least accurate on longitude and latitude; even Wikipedia is pretty useful.

What are the furthest points North, South, East and West you have visited?

Farthest north for me: Åre, Sweden: 63.40 degrees north
Farthest south: Jerusalem, 31.76 degrees north
Farthest east: Baku, Azerbaijan: 49.88 degrees east
Farthest west: San Francisco, California: 122.44 degrees west

These four points can be used to define a rectangle (well, in more-or-less spherical geometry they do) whose borders lie along the lines of latitude and longitude you have identified. What’s at the centre of this region? Have you been there? Where is the nearest place to the centre you have visited?

Centre of rectangle: 36.28 degrees west, 47.58 degrees north; it’s the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the nearest land apparently being the island of Corvo in the Azores. I’ve never been there, nor have I been to Corvo island; my centre spot is about equidistant from the far west of Ireland and New Brunswick, both of which I have been to.

Actually I suspect this meme is best suited to those who have spent their lives exclusively on one continent. And anyone who’s actually gone around the world, or been further west than they have east, can’t do it at all.

Still, it gave me the excuse for a nice picture:

News from EurActiv:

Estonia is the only country in Europe where access to the internet is a constitutional right. Sixty per cent of the country’s 1.33 million inhabitants have internet-connected computers at their homes. Those who also have an electronic identity card can use it to vote via the internet in the local government council elections.

We will watch with interest…

Pictures from Robert Pirsig’s 1968 trip on which the book was based. (Hat-tip .)

http://www.antiwar.com/malic/?articleid=7601

Yet it would be wrong to think the ICG is influencing Washington and Brussels. Rather, the Group is a front for Imperialist policymakers who dominate both state apparatuses regardless of the party in power; its status in the media of a “respected think tank” allows it to air views that may be seen as extremist at the time, but through repetition and gradual adoption become mainstream.

You would think they could pay me better if that were really the case.

http://www.serbianna.com/columns/mb/041.shtml

However, a slightly streamlined position of a “conditional” independence for the Kosovo province has been circulated in the media by the newly elected Prime Minister of Albania, Sali Berisha, and in all likelihood on the insistence of the ICG whose proximity to the Brussels provides a first hand take at the sentiments of fear among European diplomats at the certainty that Kosovo will join Albania and politically probably absorb it if approved independence.

I love the concept of my being able to make the new Albanian government tremble and bow to my will! As it happens, I do vaguely know two of the ministers in Berisha’s cabinet; I emailed them both with a short note of congratulations when they were appointed last month; one of them replied, the other did not bother. I haven’t even seen their ambassador here for months, though I have a lunch date with him on Friday.

I talked to a journalist the other day; and forgot to clarify whether I was on or off the record. So my heart leapt to my mouth this morning when I realised I had been quoted, perfectly accurately, as saying that a senior UN official has a record of “infuriating friends, colleagues and allies.” A quick and grovelling phone call to the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague followed. But her political adviser told me not to worry. “First of all,” he said “We hadn’t actually picked up on this report. And secondly, I think she will be flattered rather than annoyed!”

Phew.

In Balmoral, a stage 6 Alliance (Ekin) transfer went 42% to Sinn Féin (Long) and 42% to the UUP (Birnie and Stoker); normally, one would expect the UUP to get rather more than SF. Then, in stage 7, the UUP (Birnie) was pipped by less than 1 vote by the DUP (Patterson), and in stage 9, the latter was elected.

There is no mystery here; Ekin’s surplus came from the votes transferred to him from an SDLP candidate. Of the 1673 votes in his quote, 1508 were from Alliance first preferences, 16 from an independent candidate and the rest from elected and excluded SDLP candidates. Ekin had a surplus because he got too many votes from the SDLP; it’s entirely defensible that the votes that arrived with Ekin last were also the first out. Sad for Esmond Birnie, but wntirely within the rules.

At stage 6 in West Tyrone, the UUP (Bleakley) on 918.74 and SF (Kelly) on 913.08 were competing for the last seat under a quota of 1078. An SDLP (McDonnell) surplus of 31.19 was then transferred, stage 7, and even though his total of 1109.19 included 3.29 votes from the DUP, nothing went to the UUP, pretty well everything went to SF, and just 0.44 was non-transferable. Kelly went on to 932.58 and was elected (by default), while Bleakley, still on 918.74, was unelected.

This really is a completely inadequate description of what happened. Barry McElduff (SF) had a surplus of 393 (quota was 1078, he had 1471 first preferences and so was elected on the first count). His surplus was distributed on the second count. There were 1427 ballot papers with a first preference for McElduff and a valid next preference. They were therefore each transferred with a value of 0.27 (since 393/1427 = 0.275402943). 170 of these papers went to McDonnell at a value of 45.90; he already had 1060 first preferences and had picked up 3.29 votes (7 papers at 0.47) from a DUP first count surplus, so it was enough to put McDonnell over the quota by 31.19.

When it finally came time for McDonnell’s surplus to be distributed, the 170 votes that put him over the quote were the ones from which the surplus was taken. There were 123 of them, so they were transferred at a value of 0.25 (since 31.19/123 = 0.253577236). Not at all surprising that since they came from SF they went back to SF, since the only other remaining candidate was a Unionist.

To say that “just 0.44 was non-transferable” is simply wrong. In point of fact, 47 of the transferred votes in the package of 170 were non-transferable. The 0.44 added to the “Non-transferable” tally is a book-keeping factor, with only an indirect relation to the pieces of paper.

But even if we took the position that the 3.29 votes from the DUP should have counted in the 31.19 surplus, each of the seven ballot papers in question would have had its value rounded down to 0.01; it would not have done much for Bleakley.

Other anomalies, if not errors, occurred. In Abbey, for example, with two other DUP candidates and one UUP already elected and with 3 other candidates eliminated, a stage 8 surplus from the DUP apparently involved no non-transferables at all!

Nothing at all incredible here. The surplus was 8.96; 32 votes happened to be transferable; so each of them went at a rate of 0.28, with nothing left over.

In Moyle, a stage 2 transfer showed a non-transferable total of 0.22 which equates with an impossibility: just half a voter!

No idea where this “half a voter” comes from. This count is such a simple one that I may as well put the entire thing here (slightly rearranged for clarity):

David McAllister	DUP	481	-198.00	283.00
George Hartin	DUP	470	–	470.00
William Graham	UUP	326	–	326.00
Price McConaghy	Ind	222	59.74	281.74
Robert McIlroy	UUP	172	123.54	295.54
Thomas Palmer	Ind	23	14.50	37.50

It’s fairly straightforward to calculate that 341 of McAllister’s 481 votes were transferable, at a rate of 0.58 (since 198/341 = 0.580645161); and 213 went to McIlroy, 103 to McConaghy and 25 to Palmer. That leaves a remaider of 0.22.

Well, as guessed, the mysterious pronunciation of “divisive” by Tom Daschle was, in fact, di-VISS-ive /dəˈvɪsɪv/ – so far of 76 people who’ve taken my poll, precisely one shares that pronunciation; and she is Swedish. It’s seven each for di-VIZZ-ive /dəˈvɪzɪv/ and di-VIZE-ive /dəˈvaɪzɪv/, with a certain Belfast/Baltic bias for the first, and a slight Scottish preference for the second, but nothing too systematic. I’m with the 80% who say di-VICE-ive /dəˈvaɪsɪv/. So perhaps we have established a distinct Stockholm/South Dakota pronunciation of the word.

For the other variant, the “trap/bath” split, basically the question being do “crass” and “class” rhyme for you, we who think they do rhyme outnumber youse who think they don’t rhyme by two to one. There’s a fairly obvious southern England grouping who pronounce the two vowels differently, joined by the odd Australian, and a few dissident Americans, Scots, and Irish (including, er, my brother). There’s an interesting Wikipedia article about this here.

I’m asking because I heard an interview with Tom Daschle this morning and was really surprised by his pronunciation; wondering if it’s just a South Dakota thing, or if it’s more widespread?

(The mysterious symbols between slashes are the international phonetic alphabet renderings of the sounds, to try and make it clearer what I mean – probably unsuccessfully!)

…Unicef actually did it for Belgian TV here (3 MB .wmv file) – the Smurfs bit starts 39 seconds into the clip.

It should be added that there is a Serious Message here as well, and that Unicef deserve our support.

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all. (Ecclesiastes, 9:11)

It may be that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong – but that’s the way to bet. (Damon Runyon)

1. Name someone with the same birthday as you:
   I actually have a web page about this. Unfortunately none of them is particularly famous. It’s a bit out of date now, in that I have discovered two celebrities, wrestler Glenn Jacobs and musician/actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who were born on precisely the same date as me. I see Warren Clarke (1947) should also be on the list.
2. Where was your first kiss?
   At a sixth form disco; it never came to anything (she just snogged me randomly, at least partly to annoy her boyfriend).
3. Have you ever seriously vandalized someone else’s property?
   No.
4. Have you ever hit someone of the opposite sex?
   No.
5. Have you ever sung in front of a large number of people?
   Apart from the odd office party, not much since my school days.
6. What’s the first thing you notice about the preferred sex?
   Curves.
7. What really turns you on?
   Curves.
8. What do you order at Starbucks?
   Frappucino.
9. What is your biggest mistake?
   Not getting out of studying science sooner.
10. Have you ever hurt yourself on purpose?
    No.
11. Say something totally random about yourself:
    I like factorising large numbers.
12. Has anyone ever said you looked like a celebrity?
    Not since Joe Ninety ended.
13. Do you still watch kiddy movies or tv shows?
    I sometimes get little choice!
14. Did you have braces?
    No.
15. Are you comfortable with your height?
    Yes.
16. What is the most romantic thing someone of the preferred sex has done for you?
    I’ll take the fifth.
17. When do you know it’s love?
    You just do.
18. Do you speak any other languages?
    Dutch, French, German, a little Serbian/Croatian/Bosnia and a bit less Macedonian, Russian and Italian.
19. Have you ever been to a tanning salon?
    Never.
20. What magazines do you read?
    The Economist; Interzone; sometimes the US sf magazines; my subscription to Fortnight (Northern Ireland current affairs monthly, despite the title) has just lapsed; I pick up E-Sharp and The Sprout (both EU politics) when I see them.
21. Have you ever ridden in a limo?
    No. Ambassadorial cars, yes.
22. Has anyone you were really close to passed away?
    Yes.
23. Do you watch MTV?
    Not systematically. Will occasionally pause while channel-surfing.
24. What’s something that really annoys you?
    Bigotry.
25. What’s something you really like?
    Lying in bed reading a good book.
26. Do you like Michael Jackson?
    No.
27. Can you dance?
    I do dance when it’s called for. I don’t think I’m especially good at it though.
28. What’s the latest you have ever stayed up?
    I have pulled plenty of all-nighters in my time, but could never go all the way through the next day – sleep inevitably kicks in arouond breakfast time.
29. Have you ever been rushed by an ambulance into the emergency room?
    No. Have driven my wife to hospital three times to have babies.
30. Do you actually read these when other people fill them out?
    Yes. Do you?

Just spent a half hour listening to last week’s BBC Radio documentary about Arthur C Clarke. Summary here, Real Audio recording here. Fascinating stuff; Heather Couper goes to Sri Lanka to interview him on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of his Wireless World paper, “Extraterrestrial “Relays”, which paved the way for communications satellites. Contributions also from Clarke’s brother Fred and sf author Stephen Baxter, and extracts from his books. Most memorable bits for me were Clarke’s own modesty in admitting he failed to foresee the silicon chip (though I think he came pretty close, in Imperial Earth) and the banter between Clarke and Asimov at a 1974 public meeting in London:

Clarke: Ladies, gentlemen, and, in case there are any robots or extraterrestrials present, gentlebeings: I’m not going to waste any time introducing Isaac Asimov. That would be as pointless as introducing the Equator, which indeed he is coming to resemble more and more closely.
The rumour that there is a certain rivalry between us should have been put to rest once and for all in my recent book, Report on Planet Three. For those of you foolish enough not to have obtained that small masterpiece, the dedication reads as follows:
In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov Treaty, the second-best science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science fiction writer.

Asimov: …from here on in, I won’t mention him at all. Let us instead talk about science fiction, which after all is what we both do – I because I am a great writer, and Arthur because he is a stubborn writer.