It’s a peculiar profession, but I hope you win.

• rosefox: "You just stand there looking cute, and when something moves, you shoot"
  How to get work as a freelancer
  (tags: work)
• jimvanpelt: What I Have Learned From Reading George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones
  (tags: sf)
• ELIAMEP Thesis 4/2009: The European Union and its Neighbourhood: Time for a Rethink :: ELIAMEP
  Brilliant and devastating analysis of the weakness of the EU’s policy towards it eastern neighbours
  (tags: eu)
• A Czech warning: out-voting Britain would break the EU | Charlemagne’s notebook | Economist.com
  The positive aspects of the EU rotating presidency
  (tags: eu)

I loved Robert Anton Wilson’s fiction and non-fiction in my late teens and early twenties, and so was delighted to discover this audiobook of interviews and lectures – most of it a series of five long interviews from about 2000, and then a couple of lectures delivered in Boulder, Colorado, in earlier years. I’d heard or read most of it before, and have outgrown some of it, but his humorous, cynical, sceptical take on life, politics, literature, religion and the nature of reality was a refreshing break for me over the last few weeks (switching between this and the much less interesting METAtropolis). His Brooklyn drawl seemed to sharpen the humourous but deadly serious points he was making beautifully. (Though I was sufficiently perplexed by the way he pronounced "monotheism" as "m’NŌTHyism" to set up a poll about it.)

I was really prompted to get this because LibraryThing kept recommending it to me; apparently because the other owners of many books in my library also own and like this one. The full list of related books, as diagnosed by LibraryThing’s algorithms, is long and suitably eclectic and Discordian; I think Wilson would have been very glad to be seen in the company of some of these, and I hope that the authors of others (at least one of whom occasionally reads this lj) would be please to be grouped with him.

Just been to the physiotherapist in the wake of my recent back problems. He demonstrated convincingly that my left leg is slightly shorter than my right leg. In 42 years I had never noticed that, and nobody else had ever pointed it out.

A rather good character study by Tomine of Ben Tanaka, a young Japanese-American man who is, frankly, a bit of a dick. His various girlfriends (and his friends who are girls, who tend to be into girls themselves) all try to make him aware of his shortcomings (the title of the book is also of course a double entendre on Ben’s nervousness about the size of his own dick, which feeds into his behaving like one). Tomine manages to show us Ben’s failure to listen and still make him, if not sympathetic, at least comprehensible, and shows a convincing picture of what it’s like to be an Asian-American in California. Definitely worth picking up.

• A psephological interlude – Splintered Sunrise
  ha-tip to Mick Fealty: why STV is too good
  (tags: stv ireland)
  FT.com / UK – UN disquiet puts Ban’s second term in doubt
  Problems at the top
  (tags: world)
• From Yerevan to Tehran? | afoe | A Fistful of Euros | European Opinion
  The Armenian precedent for the Iran situation
  (tags: world)

A rather tough read about the arrival of the American oil companies in an unnamed Arab statelet, and the social disruption that this inflicts on the population.

I like the way in which the “Americans” are shown as alien beings, as the Other in a hitherto stable and settled society; I think that being shown oneself (and for these purposes I am certainly an “American”) as others see one is always a good thing, and Munif does this blisteringly well.

I think he is not as good as Chinua Achebe at demonstrating the disruptive impact of western colonialism on the local society. Perhaps (though I would be dubious about making this comparison) that impact was less in the Gulf States than in Nigeria. Munif has existing power structures (the emir) being reinforced and distorted in their authority by the arrival of the outsiders. Achebe has the local power structures devastated beyond repair.

Both Munif and Achebe present a somewhat pre-lapsarian view of the original societies. Achebe is worse in this respect, but it is still notable that Munif’s story is told almost entirely – apart from two or three chapters out of 77 – from the point of view of the male characters; I don’t think there are more than half a dozen women named in the book.

Anyway, an educational read, but I would have liked a bit more nuance in the narrative.

This is an excellent short guide to philosophy. I am not widely enough read in the subject to know to what extent Russell is pushing his own views rather than simply giving an overview of the subject, but he succeeded in persuading me that the questions of Berkeley, Hume, Kant, et al are not stupid, but very interesting and part of the gateway to opening up one’s thoughts about the world as a whole. I found myself thinking of particular resonances with my political work, and the very nature of knowledge. He has a great final chapter about why this is all worthwhile, online here, but this was my favourite paragraph (with apologies for the sexist language of 1912):

The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find, as we saw in our opening chapters, that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.

I particularly love that line about freeing one’s thoughts from the “tyranny of custom”. Good stuff.

…or so I deduce from his website:

Montenegrin media space was over the past few days contaminated by the many-times-rehashed science fiction stories about cigarette smuggling and Milo Djukanovic’s illegally acquired wealth…

In the original:

Crnogorski javni prostor dodatno je proteklih dana kontaminiran već mnogo puta prežvakanim naučno-fantastičnim pričama o švercu cigareta i nezakonitom bogaćenju Mila Đukanovića…

(official Montenegrin government press release of 4 June; of course the stories have been around for a lot longer than that.)

• blacksearoamer – Pimms in short supply
  Sad times at the British Embassy in Tirana
  (tags: balkans)
• FT.com / UK – Washington is unable to call all the shots
  The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meets
  (tags: world)
• FT.com / Comment / Opinion – The European Union can be proud but not complacent
  The European project, 52 years on
  (tags: eu)
• Atlas Obscura | Wondrous, curious, and bizarre locations around the world
• Omnivoracious: There and Back Again: Five Reasons Tolkien Rocks (Guest Blogger China Mieville)
  China Mieville on the Writer of the Century
  (tags: sf)

A great nostalgia item, a new episode of Firefly in graphic novel form, set (obviously) between the end of the series and the movie. Another of the nominees for the experimental Hugo category Best Graphic Story, and so far my favourite of the three I’ve read. I tried the early Buffy season 8 comics, but didn’t like the artwork on the characters; Will Conrad seems to have tried harder here, so that they actually look like who they’re are meant to be. Though really what makes it is the script; a fairly ordinary space opera story, shot through with those moments of wit and characterisation that made the original TV series such fun. I can’t imagine this appealing much to people who hadn’t seen Firefly or Serenity, but they are clearly not the intended audience!

This is an audiobook of five stories about future cities, read mainly by actors from Battlestar Galactica, on the Hugo shortlist for Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form. I whined a few weeks back about the technical difficulties I had in getting hold of it, because of the DRM protection on the official publication; my thanks to the person who helped me over that hurdle.

I confess that audiobooks, as opposed to plays, don’t always work for me. Each of these five stories is of the order of two hours in length, so not well suited to the concentration span I normally have while commuting. In addition, I found the voice registers of three of the actors doing the readings (Michael Hogan, Scott Brick and Stefan Rudnicki) too low to really hear distinctly over the bacground noise of my train journey. This isn’t usually a problem for me listening to Big Finish or Shakespeare productions with numerous actors playing different parts. I therefore didn’t really take in much of the stories by Jay Lake, Tobias Buckell and Karl Schroeder, though I liked what I could hear.

The basic concept of the shared world, set in a near future where state structures have collapsed and cities per se have become largely autonomous political actors, combined with a somewhat sinister worldwide culture of game-playing which mixes geocaching with Diplomacy, is a great idea. Unfortunately I can’t really render a judgement as to how well it was executed.

Having said that, I enjoyed the two stories I was able to hear clearly – Elizabeth Bear’s “The Red in the Sky is Our Blood”, read by Kandyse McClure, and in particular John Scalzi’s “Utere Nihil…”, a rather charming coming-of-age story in the comedic cyberpunk thriller mode, read very effectively by Alessandro Juliani, which to me stood out as the gem of the collection.

So, that concludes my absorption of the Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form nominees. My ballot in the end will probably go:

1. Dark Knight
2. WALL-E
3. METAtropolis
4. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
5. Iron Man

Unlike the films, I’m tallying METAtropolis as a book for bookblogging purposes, which is my usual practice for audiobooks with only one actor per story..

• Six things you must do in… Northern Cyprus
  I have done three of them.
  (tags: cyprus)
  Somalia’s only pirate
  Turns out not to be a terribly exclusive interview
  (tags: somaliland)

Some day, or set of days, I shall have a nice long holiday in a temperate climate without too many distractions, and immerse myself in Proust, Ulysses and Virginia Woolf. As predicted when I read Mrs Dalloway, I very much enjoyed To the Lighthouse, with its intense description of two days separated by years and a war, but its not really the kind of book to fit into my commuting, or to get to grips with over a hot weekend when one is cooking lunch for guests. It requires, and I suspect rewards, patient concentration; and yet is only 150 pages long. Very easy to pick up, very difficult to properly absorb. (Perhaps this is one book that might work well in audio format.)

Another solid enough Tenth Doctor novel from Rayner (I haven’t checked, but she must by now be one of the most prolific of Who writers, combining books and audio). In a slightly confusing stylistic quirk, about half of the book is told by Martha Jones in the first person, while most of the rest is also from her point of view but in the third person in varying degrees of tightness. This does give us odd moments of nice characterisation like this:

‘Doctor!’ Vanni said (people do that, you know. It’s always ‘Doctor!’ Never ‘Martha!’ Same with villains. ‘Get the Doctor and the girl!’ Oh well, maybe one day it’ll be ‘Get Martha and the man!’ and he’ll know what it feels like to be the anonymous spare part. Not that I actually want to be captured by villains or anything, I should point out).

Which is more of a meditation on the companion’s lot than we are used to. As usual (as I’m beginning to realise) a slightly out-of-nowhere ending, but basically a decent addition to the shelves.

explains.

I was off work for most of last week, but clearing my inbox have found this press release from the Czech government (currently holding the EU presidency), published last Thursday (11 June):

Presidency Press Statement on the state of play regarding the ‘telecoms package’

The Council of the European Union today held an informal discussion on the state of play regarding the ‘telecoms package’. The Member States consider this set of legislative proposals very important, not least because of the current economic downturn and the role the sector of information and communication technologies can play in mitigating its impact. The Council agrees that the three proposals of the ‘telecoms package’ should be adopted as soon as possible.

That is also why the Council, represented by the Czech Presidency, had spared no effort in intense discussions with the European Parliament on the package earlier this year, and finally reached a compromise solution with the Parliament’s negotiators on 28 April. However, in a plenary session on 6 May, the European Parliament adopted one provision (known as amendment 138 or 46) that runs counter to the agreement.

The Council is ready to work towards a solution of this last outstanding problem and looks forward to working with the newly appointed European Parliament during conciliation. However, the Council cannot take any formal position at present, since the Parliament has still not officially informed the Member States about its second reading position.

I suspect this is more an attempt by the caretaker technocratic Czech government to explain to the more impatient member states (ie France) why they haven’t done anything about it, rather than an attempt to nudge the new European Parliament into changing its mind. Will keep watching this space though.

I guess that the idiom of “to twig” meaning “to understand” originates in a direct lift from the Irish verb “tuigeann”.

I very much enjoyed Delisle’s book about Burma, but was disappointed in this. Some of the oddities he describes (cavernously empty restaurants with fictional menus and crap service, frenetically alcoholic international NGO workers) are entirely familiar to me from my time in the Balkans and could happen anywhere in the world where there is or has recently been a crisis. His description of the Koreans he actually meets is patronising rather than sympathetic; he somehow got the balance better in Burma. I would have liked to know a bit more about the economics of film animation that led to a Québecois cartoonist ending up in Pyongyang in the first place, but that remains a mystery. The situation in North Korea is clearly awful for its inhabitants and potentially dangerous for the rest of us, but I didn’t get the insights I had hoped for from this book.

Announcing Round 2 (Great Home Decorating Ideas)Round 1 (An Older Kind of Magic).

“…for her own part she liked her boobies. Paul must sit by her. She had kept a place for him. Really, she sometimes thought she liked the boobies best.”

• Ireland As 100 People – Strange Maps
  What languages are spoken in Ireland?
  (tags: ireland)
• Making writing | Digital strategy & essays about being alive
  How to write good blog entries
  (tags: blogging)
• The SWISH Report (15) | open Democracy News Analysis
  Advice to Al-Qaeda
  (tags: war)
• The new parliament: A bit like the old one | afoe | A Fistful of Euros | European Opinion
  Analysis of the European elections (across the whole EU)
  (tags: eu)

Some of you know of the Book Game. It has the following rules:

Each game is run by one person, and is made up of a number of identical rounds (usually 5)

Each round, the person who’s running the game picks a book, and tells everyone else the author, title and some description of the book (I usually use the blurb on the back and an extract from the text). A fixed amount of time passes, during which the players write and submit a plausible first line. Then all the first lines, together with the real one, are published and the players have to guess which is the real one. A point for guessing correctly, a point for someone guessing yours. At the end of the game, the player with most points wins.

Over at the LJ community dedicated to this, which rejoices in the name of , I am moderating the next round. Feel free to come and join in.

This is another Hugo nominee in the Best Related Book category, a collection of Paul Kincaid’s excellent essays and talks about sf. I particularly enjoyed the first quarter of the book, which includes the title essay and some fascinating analysis of various sf encyclopedias, Year’s Bests, and the influence of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness on the genre. There are substantial sections on two authors, Christopher Priest and Gene Wolfe, and also essays on various British sf writers, and writers from elsewhere (including an excellent piece on Borges). There is a surgical dissection of Haldeman’s Forever Free, which I would point out as a great justification by example of writing negative reviews (in case anyone thinks such justification is necessary). I admit that I skimmed the chapters on books or writers which I don’t know so well, but it is all entertaining and insightful, as you would expect. Strongly recommended, if you can actually get hold of it.

I’ve been enjoying the first few Fables volumes, but skipped ahead to the latest because it is one of the Hugo nominees for Best Graphic Story. It is rather fun: starts with a vignette of the relationship between Little Boy Blue and Rose Red, then Cinderella’s daring rescue of Pinocchio, then most of it is the war between the good guys led by Prince Charming (using machine guns and bombs) and the bad guys led by their mastermind Geppetto (who restrict themselves to magic, and therefore lose). I did feel a lack of moral ambiguity on either side – the good guys are all good, the bad guys all committed to their cause; I suppose it is a fairy tale, but Willingham’s interpretation of the characters is so sophisticated in other ways that I was disappointed in this respect. (I know that Rose Red at least has a more ambiguous past, in one of the previous volumes, but there’s no mention of that here.)

I’m glad, as I said before, that this Hugo category has been introduced for this year, and I hope it returns.

• watervole: Star Trek XI and thoughts on Kirk's motivations.
  (tags: sf)

I don’t actually follow Northern Irish news all that closely these days, but one of the ways I keep in touch is to read the weekly political update from lobbying firm Chambré Public Affairs (I still feel a bit guilty about nearly putting the author’s eye out with an arrow from a toy bow when he was five and I was six). Here’s a glorious piece of snark from this week’s edition, about the conduct of the successful candidates in this week’s election:

Doing the Hokey Cokey

PUT your right arm in, pull your right arm out, do the hokey cokey… Poll-topper Bairbre de Brún must have felt like she was in a weird version of the playground game at Monday’s European election count in Belfast’s Kings Hall.

She congratulated Jim Nicholson with a handshake, but when she put her hand out to the DUP’s Diane Dodds, the newly elected MEP steadfastly refused to shake the proffered digits of Ms de Brún.

Mrs Dodds said the DUP wasn’t there to be “best buddies with anybody”.

Mission achieved then Diane!

I believe subscription is free from the Chambré website.

There are a number of theories explaining where the name “Leuven” originates from. The frame on the right illustrates one of them: that it commemorates a Scottish nobleman of the era of Julius Caesar, himself named “Loup”, who founded a settlement called “Lupolin” on the site of the future university city. Note his drooping bagpipes, perhaps a subtle reference to the future importance of beer in the city’s economic development, a theme to which the book returns over and over again.

There are a number of other stories about the history of Leuven, all retold and illustrated here by François Stas, all in Dutch (which I can at least read) with commentary from the characters in local dialect (which I have a lot more trouble with). I’m still a bit confused about the stories of Fiere Margariete and Paep Thoon, but at least I now know the details, even if I can’t quite see the point. I was enlightened to discover the origin of the city flag – which is identical to the Austrian flag, but it seems this is just coincidence; it commemorates the battle of Leuven of 891, when Arnulf of Carinthia defeated the Vikings and afterwards the river Dijle flowed clear between two bloodstained banks.

There have been a lot of invaders around here. I had forgotten that one of them was Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, he of the Bodleian Library. Most of the others were Germans, French and Dutch (with the odd incidence of Spanish in the 16th century). It’s quite difficult to make war and massacres funny, and on the whole Stas skates around the historical details rather delicately, apart from the rather unavoidable matter of August 1914. It’s entertaining enough, and I certainly learned from it.

Since I’ve written up all the films I’ve been watching in bed this week, I’ll also say something about the one we actually saw in the cinema last week. As it happens, the only Trek novel I have read in the last twenty years is a Vonda McIntyre story about how Kirk and Spock got together, so I had already been exposed to one origin tale. (Her recent account of her involvement with the Trek franchise is also entertaining.)

I am sure Vonda McIntyre, who I know reads this lj occasionally, won’t object to my conclusion that the film is much more memorable. Films generally are more memorable, because they are more of a social experience: it’s not just you communicating with the author via a hunk of dead tree, it’s your imagined interaction with the characters on screen; and your shared reactions with the person you’re seeing it with, plus all your friends and acquaintances who have seen it, in a group experience that only books about Harry Potter can achieve. (All of which is muted but still not entirely absent if you’re watching the film a year later on a crappy MP4 player while in bed dosed up on painkillers; cf my write-ups of Hellboy II, Iron Man and Dark Knight.)

The decision to set the new Star Trek in a parallel timetrack, where Kirk’s father died, Vulcan is destroyed and Spock is in love with Uhura, also of course liberated JJ Abrams from many of the constraints that McIntyre’s novel had; she had to end up with the Enterprise as we know it, Abrams theoretically didn’t but we cheer because he did anyway. We cheer at a lot of places in the film, in roughly this order: Uhura, Captain Pike, the hungover McCoy, the green-skinned girl, the first appearance of Spock, the Enterprise including Chekov and Sulu, the appearance of Old Spock, Scotty (and his sandwiches and sidekick), and Leonard Nimoy’s closing monologue. It looks fantastic, spaceships, monsters, dying planets and all. The supporting characters – Chekov, Sulu, McCoy, Uhura, Scotty and even Captain Pike – get a lot of very pleasing development. There are some cracking lines of dialogue, even if some of the references to Trek history may pass you by as they did me. There were of course a number of Things Which Don’t Make Sense (another area where films often seem to have more liberty of manœuvre than books) but it would be unkind to list them. (Just one example, though: McCoy smuggling Kirk on board the Enterprise would surely have resulted in court-martial and expulsion from the service for both of them!)

This was really good fun, and I venture to predict that it will win next year’s Hugo, and other awards, by a country mile.