Barack Obama on 5 Days That Shaped His Presidency

Very interesting.
(tags: uspolitics )

Current
Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in honour of Jack Vance, eds. George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois
Winter Song, by Colin Harvey
SPQR, by Mary Beard
The Joy Device, by Justin Richards

Last books finished
Short Trips: The Solar System, ed. Gary Russell
Companion Piece, by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

Last week’s audios
And You Will Obey Me, by Alan Barnes
The Victorian Age, by AK Benedict

Next books
AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers, ed. Nnedi Okorafor
Kings of the North, by Cecelia Holland
Angels & Visitations: A Miscellany, by Neil Gaiman

Books acquired in last week
Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith
Seventeen, by Booth Tarkington
Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann

Great toilets of Brussels

Because you needed to know.
(tags: Belgium tourism )

Government bars foreign academics from advising on Brexit

Not a joke. (Probably illegal.)
(tags: ukpolitics eu brexit )

Second frame of third page:

Barbara: "O tree, how can I achieve complete serenity?"

As previously noted, I'm a big fan of the Dutch graphic artist Barbara Stok, whose only work translated into English (so far) is her biography of Vincent van Gogh – I bought Toch Een Geluk (roughly, "It's Just As Well") at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Her work is generally autobiographical, ranging in length from a single frame to a half-dozen pages for individual pieces. In this 2016 volume she recounts incidents from her life around 2010 when she wrote and then published the van Gogh book – though in fact that occupies less than a quarter of the pages, the rest being about life with her partner Ricky (who is a new devlopment since the earlier books that I had read). Her humour is self-deprecating, her views on making the world a better place and being a better person mildly inspiring, and the art manages to convey a surprising amount of emotion and depth in a very cartoonish style. Toch Een Geluk is apparently now being translated into Korean (after the success of the van Gogh book there); I’m a bit surprised that no enterprising English-language publisher has picked up on her work yet.

Theresa May joins ranks of delusional Brexiteers

“Brexit negotiations: a discussion by the Tory party with itself”
(tags: ukpolitics eu brexit )

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Eventually [character] was moved by ambulance to a Sister Kenny Institute in Philadelphia, where, by this point in the summer, the epidemic was nearly as bad as it was in Newark and the hospital’s wards were so crowded that he was fortunate to get a bed. There the hot pack treatment continued, along with painful stretching of the contracted muscles of his arms and legs and of his back—which the paralysis had twisted—in order to “reeducate” them. He spent the next fourteen months in rehabilitation at the Kenny Institute, gradually recovering the full use of his right arm and partial use of his legs, though he was left with a twisted lower spine that had to be corrected several years later by a surgical fusion and a bone graft and the insertion of metal rods attached to the spine. The recuperation from the surgery put him on his back in a body cast for six months, tended day and night by his grandmother. He was at the Kenny Institute when President Roosevelt unexpectedly died, in April 1945, and the country went into mourning. He was there when defeated Germany surrendered in May, when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, and when Japan asked to surrender to the Allies a few days later. World War II was over, his buddy Dave would be coming home unscathed from fighting in Europe, America was jubilant, and he was still in the hospital, disfigured and maimed.

I don't often post here these days about my work, but this is an exception. A month or so ago I was handed a new dossier – assisting Rotary in its campaign to eradicate polio worldwide, as part of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. It is worth noting that tremendous success has been achieved in this campaign. Polio is now endemic only in certain parts of Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan; worldwide confirmed cases are now down to 26 in those three countries for the first nine months of this year, compared to 650 in 16 countries worldwide as recently as in 2011. It's entirely possible that polio could become the second major human disease, after smallpox, to be completely eradicated from the planet. (We are in a race with guinea worm. Rinderpest has already been eradicated, but it affects cattle rather than humans.)

We who were born in the developed world after 1955 have no memory of just how universal polio was, but the scars are around us if we care to look. An old friend in Belfast, who died last year, used a wheelchair for most of his life after surviving polio as a child in the 1940s. A relative, in her 70s now, similarly caught it as a child and recovered but with one leg permanently weakened. The list of famous polio survivors has some very surprising names on it, but the most striking thing about it is that it is so long. I enjoy all of the work that I do, but every minute that I spend helping Rotary's campaign has a special significance.

I was advised to read Nemesis, by Philip Roth, to help me get to grips with the problem. It's a short but very compelling book about an outbreak of polio among a Jewish community in Newark, New Jersey, in 1944. The central character has to deal with the consequences of the outbreak first at the playground he is supervising during the school holiday, then at the summer camp where his fiancé is working, then with the aftermath of recovery. The hot hot summer, and oppressive social context of a suburban society which is both subject to prejudice from the outside and rife with prejudice of its won, are vividly depicted, and it conveys better than any textbook possibly could the psychological impact of polio, both the general effects of any epidemic disease, and the specifics of this particular illness, viewed from more than fifty years later. It is actually the first Philip Roth novel that I have read, but it won't be the last.

I mistakenly thought that this was non-fiction when I bought it, and it zoomed to the top of my unread non-fiction pile. Next in that pile is SPQR, by Mary Beard.

The Tories have finally become Ukip

And I am becoming an @iandunt fan.
(tags: ukpolitics migration brexit )

Amber Rudd: it’s not racist to make firms list foreign workers.

Yes it is.
(tags: race migration eu ukpolitics brexit )

42 Douglas Adams quotes to live by

Yep.
(tags: lifehacking sf )

Second paragraph of third story (“Retreat from Earth”):

So, forty million years after the last of the old ones had gone to his eternal rest, men began to rear their cities where once the architects of a greater race had flung their towers against the clouds. And in the long echoing centuries before the birth of man, the aliens had not been idle but had covered half the planet with their cities, filled with blind, fantastic slaves, and though man knew these cities, for they often caused him infinite trouble, yet he never suspected that all around him in the tropics an older civilisation than his was planning busily for the day when it would once again venture forth upon the seas of space to regain its lost inheritance.

I got this at the end of 2014 because I had had the idea of writing up three sfnal views of 2015 by Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein; these would have been the Asimov short story “Runaround”, Clarke’s original short story version of “Earthlight”, and the Heinlein novel I Will Fear No Evil. However, I discovered that “Runaround” wasn’t very interesting and I Will Fear No Evil wasn’t set in 2015, and dropped the project before getting to “Earthlight”. As it turns out, I liked the original version of “Earthlight” much more than the novel (which I reread only this summer); it much better constructed and pacier, and I would go so far as to call it the best discovery in the collection for me. However, I could also see why Clarke revised it so heavily for publication as a novel – the science had dated really rather rapidly after the 1951 publication. It’s a shame that he took most of the steam out of it.

Otherwise this was mostly a reunion with old friends – almost all of the best stories by Clarke have been printed elsewhere in other collections that I own or have read, and one can see certain themes rise and fall (a lot of unsuccessful marriages at one point). I had not previously read many of the Tales from the White Hart, and I fear I did not have cause to regret that lapse. I was struck by how concentrated Clarke’s successful story-writing career actually was, despite his longevity: the first really good story is probably “The Fires Within”, from 1947, and then there is a steady rate of production with 87 stories in total from there up to “A Meeting With Medusa” in 1971; then the last stories are from 1977, 1984, two in 1986, 1992, 1997 and 1999, which is about one every four years on average.

But the good stuff remains very good, and it’s nice to revisit material that had a formative effect on my thinking as I grew up, even if its limitations in terms of gender representation are a bit more obvious to me now.

This was both the most popular book acquired in 2014 on my shelves, and also the most popular unread sf book. next on both lists is Broken Homes, by Ben Aaronovitch.

Studies show messy people and those who swear may actually be smarter and more creative

Comforting?
(tags: psychology )

Mr Grayling is wrong about the Brexit dividend to station platforms

A glorious takedown.
(tags: ukpolitics eu rail brexit )

New crackdown on overseas students and work visas

…and you must publish how many foreigners you employ.
(tags: ukpolitics eu migration brexit )

Second line of third episode:

Hargreaves: Yes, Miss?

Another audio story with the Fifth Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa, written by Simon Barnard and Paul Morris (who wrote the brilliant Scarifyers, starring Nicholas Courtney and Terry Molloy, a few years back). It’s a nice isolated space ship story: the TARDIS arrives to find the human crew mysteriously absent, and the genteel but strangely forgetful robot Hargreaves (played charmingly by Matthew Cottle, who I remember from Game On twenty years ago) more or less in charge. The captain, when she eventually turns up, is played by Nina Sosanya who was brilliant in a very different role as Trish in the TV episode Fear Her, and is also good here though with less opportunity to show it. The plot is decently intricate, with parallel time lines and false memories, though some of the black hole stuff doe not stand up to scientific analysis. Of the regulars, Sarah Sutton is given some particularly good material to work with and does it well.

However, my inner linguistic pedant winced a couple of times – in his first scene, Cottle as Hargreaves mangles “Sangiovese” (as in the wine) out of all recognition, and the mad Russian scientist played by Harry Myers does not seem to have learned Russian from anyone who had ever heard a native speaker.

Still, it’s good fun with some very chilling moments.

Why the 27 are taking a hard line on Brexit

@CER_Grant explains lucidly.
(tags: ukpolitics eu brexit )

The EU Considers how to React to new UK Timing on Brexit

@chairmanyaffle reports.
(tags: ukpolitics eu brexit )

Early Flickerings: E. H. Shepard’s Bevis (1932)

Great example of the illustrator’s art.
(tags: literature art children )

Malta PM: Brexit talks will be like the Greek bailout

Sums up the EU27 view well.
(tags: malta brexit ukpolitics eu )

Dalai Lama does impression of Donald Trump

Truly we are in the end times.
(tags: buddhism religion uspolitics )

Whatever is actually in Trump’s tax returns is worse than what the New York Times says

Yep.
(tags: uspolitics )

Don’t be fooled: May’s big EU law announcement is just admin

Yep.
(tags: brexit ukpolitics eu )

Second paragraph of third chapter (on the Hereford Mappamundi):

[Archbishop of Canterbury John] Pecham was particularly concerned about bringing the Welsh clergy into line on the issue of pluralism. This was as much a political as a religious matter. Throughout the 1270s and 1280s King Edward [I] was involved in a long and bitter conflict with independent Welsh rulers in an attempt to incorporate the realm within England. Situated in the Marches (border regions) between England and Wales, the diocese of Hereford represented the furthest extent of English political and ecclesiastical authority, and Pecham was keen to ensure it abided by his reforms. While [Bishop of Hereford Thomas] Cantilupe remained loyal to King Edward on political matters, he rejected Pecham’s attempts to challenge pluralism and other practices deeply embedded in English religious life, and resisted the archbishop’s attempts at reforming his diocese. Matters came to a head in February 1282, when the Archbishop dramatically excommunicated Cantilupe at Lambeth Palace. The disgraced bishop went into exile in France, and by March 1282 was heading to Rome, to make a direct appeal to Pope Martin IV against his excommunication.

This is the sort of history of science that I very much approve of, taking twelve well-known historical maps and weaving around them the story of how cartography has changed in line with political needs and technological developments.

There are actually thirteen maps discussed in detail rather than twelve (though The Atlantic‘s review has a good overview of the twelve):

0. The oldest known map, a cuneiform tablet from Babylon
1. Ptolemy’s Geography
2. Al-Idrīsī’s Tabula Rogeriana
3. the Hereford Mappamundi
4. the Korean Kangnido
5. Martin Waldseemüller’s map, the first to use the word “America”
6. Diogo Ribeiro’s world map, which helped Spain to claim the moluccas
7. Mercator’s world map
8. Blaeu’s Atlas
9. the Cassini dynasty’s mapping of France
10. Halford Mackinder’s geopolitical thesis
11. the Peters Projection
12. and Google Earth.

It’s arguable that this represents only a partial snapshot of the history of the world – geographically, most of these are from within the European/Middle Eastern space, and chronologically three are from the sixteenth century and another two from the centuries immediately before and after. But I think it’s legitimate for a London-based Professor of Renaissance Studies to write about what he knows, while pointing out that there are also other times and places which the interested reader can go and find out more about.

Brotton is particularly good at unpicking the ideological choices made by mapmakers at all periods, explaining how the demands of the reader / viewer / customer / patron impact on what is actually shown, and chiseling away at any concept of a perfectly representative map. For those of us who were exposed to the sociology of knowledge at an impressionable age, it’s a good bit of re-education. His deconstruction of the more distant cultures in time and space sets him up nicely for brutal dissections of Halford Mackinder and the Peters Projection, and also sets the scene for the last chapter’s interrogation of Google Earth. What we see on the map is what the map-maker has chosen to show us – not what is actually there.

This was the top non-fiction book recommended by you guys last year. Next on that list is Austerity Britain, 1945-1951, by David Kynaston.

Re-tests axed for chronically ill claimants

At last, UK Govt retreating in its war on disabled.
(tags: disability ukpolitics )

What Caused Crime to Decline in the U.S.?

Many answers, none completely convincing.
(tags: uspolitics crime )

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Donna dropped her suitcase and opened her arms. Hettie was standing in her pristine Chiswick doorway. She lived in one of the posh houses, down by the riverside.

Jenny Colgan is clearly among those who regard the Tenth Doctor / Donna pairing as one of the high points of New Who; as well as this novel, she wrote a Big Finish audio starring Tennant and Tate earlier this year. This is both rollicking sparking adventure with the two protagonists rubbing along beautifully (plus of course Donna’s grandfather Wilf), and also a sombre reflection on why everyone is so nasty to each other online these days; finding the answer takes the Tardis crew to Korea and Brazil (incidentally places where Doctor Who has cult status) to track down the alien force responsible (if only it were just aliens rather than human nature). I was fortunate to read a particularly scary chapter set on a plane immediately after disembarking from a tediously delayed flight rather than during it. But this is glorious stuff. (I see some reviewers chiding that internet trolling was not as bad in 2008 as it is now, and some specific name-checks are anachronistic; but I can live with that – there are many bigger anachronisms in the Whoniverse.)

Current
Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in honour of Jack Vance, eds. George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois
Winter Song, by Colin Harvey
SPQR, by Mary Beard
Short Trips: The Solar System, ed. Gary Russell

Last books finished
Unquenchable Fire, by Rachel Pollack
The Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke
Nemesis, by Philip Roth
Toch Een Geluk, by Barbara Stok
The Dinner, by Herman Koch

Last week’s audios
The Peterloo Massacre, by Paul Magrs

Next books
AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers, ed. Nnedi Okorafor
Angels & Visitations: A Miscellany, by Neil Gaiman
Companion Piece, by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

Why are we happy?

The upside of Northern Ireland.
(tags: northernireland )

Loss

On surgery and bereavement.
(tags: Death health )

You don’t have to be stupid to work here, but it helps

“In a world where stupidity dominates, looking good is more important than being right.”
(tags: work )

Special Hugo Awards category announced for 2017

A special Hugo category for “Best Series” will be included in the 2017 Hugo Awards.
(tags: hugos )