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This is the latest post in a series I started last November, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023. Every six-ish days I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in current circumstances when we are all somewhat distracted. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
I was hugely honoured to be present at the Presidential residence in Podgorica on 13 July 2006, the last leg of a trip that had started in Skopje and continued through Prishtina with an exciting journey through the mountains to Montenegro itself. There were perhaps 300 guests. The mood was festive, everyone shaking hands and embracing. The moment eventually came when the guards played a fanfare, and then a young man began to sing the new/old nation's anthem, joined in the second verse by a young woman, without any other accompaniment, their voices trembling with emotion. For the first time in nine decades, Montenegro was celebrating its traditional independence day as an independent state. They didn't drop a beat, or miss a note. It was one of the most electrifying things I have ever witnessed. I don't have photographs, but I was given a souvenir first day cover.
The month started with a family trip to Antwerp to see the Sultan's Elephant, an extraordinary live action steampunk show. I got a few film shots of the elephant and the little girl in action:
F celebrated his 7th birthday later in the month, and actually had a party, though my contribution was to take B on a long drive to keep her out of the way.
At the end of the month we drove as usual to Northern Ireland (Anne failing to be persuaded of the merits of Fury from the Deep), but made the tough decision to leave B in Belgium under the supervision of my mother-in-law. It actually went all right, but it was a bit sad.
I managed to read 24 books in July 2006, thanks perhaps to several long land-based trips.
6,500 pages (YTD 29,800)
3/24 (YTD 14/97) by women
2/24 (YTD 5/97) by PoC
The one I enjoyed most was The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson's classic horror tale, which you can get here. There were a lot of other good ones, and I guess my favourite reread was Fahrenheit 451, which you can get here. I thoroughly bounced off Galactic Patrol, but you can get it here.
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Sun, 08:16: RT @RespectIsVital: First Dominic Cummings travelled to Durham; “out of fear for his children” and it just happened to coincide with his mo…
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Slaughterhouse Five won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1973, with only three competitors – Silent Running, which I have not seen, and two TV films that I had not even heard of, Between Time and Timbuktu which is based on other works by Kurt Vonnegut, and The People, mostly based on a novella by Zenna Henderson, "Pottage". IMDB users rank Slaughterhouse Five 25th and 27th of all films of 1972 on the two systems; Silent Running does better at 12th and 18th, while the other two are a very long way down. Iwonder why there were only four finalists? The previous year with less than five was 1965 and the next was 1977. I haven't seen Tarkovsky's Solaris, but I think it has shown the best staying power of any sfnal film from 1972, despite being overlooked by Hugo voters. It's also a bit surprising that Conquest of the Planet of the Apes didn't get a look-in.
Anyway, here's a trailer for Slaughterhouse Five.
I had seen it long ago, and am also familiar with the book. A lot of people really rave about this film, whose director, George Roy Hill, went on to my next Oscar-winner, The Sting. I was not quite so grabbed; I think I can be politely positive, but not a lot more. The central character, Billy Pilgrim, is played at various ages and degrees of make-up by Michael Sacks (who dropped out of acting and went into tech ten years later). None of the other actors seems to have appeared in other Hugo-winning films, or Oscar-winners or Doctor Who, so that gives me one less thing to write about.
The plot concerns Billy Pilgrim's voyages up and down his personal timeline, including his time as a PoW in wartime Germany, experiencing the Allies bombing of Dresden, and then suburban unfulfilled family life, with a phase of being kidnapped by aliens who hook him up with a beautiful young porn actress who has his baby. I don't remember seeing a single non-white actor even as an extra in the entire film, and the few women characters are pretty but stupid (I don't think it passes Bechdel Two). I also wasn't really persuaded by 24-year-old Michaels Sacks made up to look older, and frustrated that we don't really get much sense of what Billy Pilgrim actually thinks about the bizarre things that happen to him; he is a very passive protagonist.
There are some good bits too. The horrors of war, and the alienating effect of combat on the participants, are well brought home, and there are some very nifty transition points between different parts of the timeline. Eugene Roche (who I remember as a lawyer in Soap) is great as Pilgrim's friend Edgar Derby who gets shot for looting, and Valerie Perrine is tremendously energetic as Montana Wildhack, the porn starlet. But I have to say I found it one of the less engaging Hugo-winning films I've seen so far. Still, if you want, you can get it here.
As usual, I went back and reread the book, which is quite short. Vonnegut felt that the film was a faithful adaptation, and I would agree with him there. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
The dog, who had sounded so ferocious in the winter distances, was a female German Shepherd. She was shivering. Her tail was between her legs. She had been borrowed that morning from a farmer. She had never been to war before. She had no idea what game was being played. Her name was Princess.
Rereading this classic, which combines the horrors of the 1945 bombing of Dresden with the sfnal captivity of the hero by the aliens of Tralfamadore. Having first come to Vonnegut via Cat's Cradle and The Sirens of Titan as a teenager, I wasn't really sure what to make of this. Coming to it again a quarter-century later, I have a much deeper appreciation of Vonnegut's savaging of the surrealism of war, and of how trauma throws the rest of your life into a weird perspective. But I also find his attitude to women much more annoying – at least, to the women in the main part of the story, the mothers of Billy Pilgrim's children, Valencia Merble and Montana Wildhack (and Pilgrim's daughter Barbara). Having said that, the sanest character in the book is probably Mary O'Hare from the ostensibly autobiographical foreword; and it must also be admitted that most of the male characters are pretty unpleasant too.
Anyway, I can't think of many other sf novels which take the Second World War as their subject, and this is probably the best in that rather small set.
Scanning the SF Encyclopedia entry on WW2, I think that last comment still stands – J.G. Ballard, Jerry Kosinski and Primo Levi all wrote sf and all wrote about the war but as far as I know, none of them combined the two themes at novel length. Edited to add: I have been reminded of Connie Willis’s Blackout/All Clear, which I had successfully been trying to forget.
This time around I found I appreciated Vonnegut's success in keeping the narrative pace balanced between the various parts of the story line, all of which have different climaxes at different times. I found his drawings annoying though, and I think I still prefer Cat's Cradle. Still, if you want, you can get it here.
Fri, 12:38: Just noting that the @BSFA winners for Novel, Short Fiction and Non-Fiction were each owned by more LibraryThing an… https://t.co/MYNz2DMhxW
Fri, 16:05: RT @LAM_Barrett: anybody else struggling to remember the last time a cloth mask accidentally went off and killed a toddler https://t.co/Xor…
Fri, 17:11: Come On and Zoom-Zoom https://t.co/s0OMnBFFpM A kids tv show that I remember well from living in the USA in 1973-4. “Oh-two-one-three-FOUR!”
Sat, 11:01: Some Saturday etymology. “door” is an ancient word. It has cognates in other Germanic languages. Dutch deur; Germa… https://t.co/8yEfqNx7Ak
“door” is an ancient word. It has cognates in other Germanic languages. Dutch deur; German Tür; Yiddish טיר (tir); Danish/Norwegian dør; Swedish dörr; Gothic (daur); Icelandic/Faroese dyr – this last is plural, and we’ll get back to that.
Let’s also note German Tor, as opposed to Tür, which means “gateway” and has drifted to mean “goal” in sports, both the target and the score. Proto-Germanic had two words, *durz for doors and *durą for a BIG door. In most descendant languages they merged, but not in German.
The Proto-Indo-European root is *dʰwer- and it has many descendants meaning “door”: Welsh dôr/drws, Breton dor, Irish doras; Russian дверь (dver’); Albanian derë; Armenian դուռ (duṙ); Sanskrit द्वार् (dvā́r), Ossetian дуар (duar); Latin foris, Greek θύρα (thýra).
Going further: Old Persian (duvarayā); Farsi/Dari در (dar), Tajik дар (dar); Urdu دوار, Hindi द्वार (dvār); Marathi दार (dār); Bengali দ্বার (dbāra); Telugu ద్వారము (dvāramu); Gujarati બારણું (bārṇũ); Burmese ဒွာရ (dwara); Thai ทวาร (spelt dwār, pronounced tá-waan).
Icelandic and Faroese dyr are always plural. So are Latvian durvis, Lithuanian duris; Belarusian дзверы (dzvjéry), Ukrainian двері (dvéri), Czech dveře, Slovak dvere, Polish drzwi. This suggests that ancient tribes had double doors at the entry to the compound.
There are interesting cases of shifting meanings. In many Slavic languages, words for “courtyard”, “court”, “palace” come from this root – Slovak & Serbo-Croat dvor, Czech dvůr, Russian, Bulgarian & Macedonian двор (dvor), Ukrainian двір (dvir). Lithuanian dvaras means “estate”.
In Latin, *dʰw -> f and forās is “outdoors”. You go out to the *forum*, a public place. The evidence suitable for public examination is *forensic*. In medieval French, people from outside are forain, which becomes English *foreign*, and the wild places outside are the *forest*.
And here’s another spin: from Greek θύρα (thýra), door, comes the word θῠρεός (thýreos), meanings include an oblong shield, adjective θυρεοειδής (thyreoidés) is applied to the shield-shaped cartilage of the larynx, which then gives its name to the adjacent *thyroid gland*.
Finally, a whole language takes its name from this root. The Persian word دربار (darbār) means a court or court gathering (cf Slavic двор/dvor above, and English durbar). The Persian spoken at court became known as دری Dari, as opposed to the فارسی Farsi spoken elsewhere.
So there you are. The ancient Indo-European root *dʰwer- gives us “door”, “forum”, “forensic”, “foreign”, “forest”, “thyroid”, “Durbar” and the name of the Dari language. Not bad for a simple mechanism to keep wild animals out and tame animals (and humans) in.
After that it did not struggle, even though its body was still as warm, its feathers as stiff and soft. Horrified at what my intervention had done, I ran away, and never wanted to go near that tree again, though it was near the path and difficult to avoid.
An intricate, interesting novel, which actually reminded me of some of Iain M. Banks’ work more than anything, with interlacing narrative perspectives in a dangerously diverse but mimimally portrayed world. There is good sex, and very bad sex, and power wielded against those who are divergent or deviant, and there is some brutal violence which I admit I found a bit of a deterrent from following the main plot. I am rather surprised that the author hasn’t written a lot more. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third section of “Travels with the Snow Queen”:
The cuff of his trousers got splashed. There were little fragments of glass everywhere. “Don’t move,” you said. You weren’t wearing shoes.
This is a subversion of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy-tale “The Snow Queen” (not the only one in sf), where the protagonist’s boyfriend is stolen by the eponymous queen and she goes on a quest to bring him back, encountering talking animals who may or may not have been humans, and subverting the original metaphor in a feminist way. It was one of Link’s first stories, bu I think it is very well done. It was first published in the very first issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the magazine edited by Link and her partner Gavin Grant, and has been reprinted in half a dozen anthologies and collections; it’s currently available online for free at Uncanny Magazine.
These were the two winners of what was then the James Tiptree Jr Award for 1998, and they are both writing of the kind that the award was surely designed to honour – both authors were very early in their careers, and Link has turned out to be reasonably prolific, if Dorsey less so. The short list was rather long, with another five short pieces and seven novels, two of which I have read – The Moon and the Sun, by Vonda McIntyre, and Sacrifice of Fools, by Ian McDonald. To be honest, the latter is one of my favourite SF novels, but I can see that it did not fit the Tiptree Award as well as the winners did.
The BSFA Award and Arthur C. Clarke Award that year were both won by Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, so I’ll move on next to Dreaming in Smoke, by Tricia Sullivan (Clarke 1999); The Extremes, by Christopher Priest (BSFA 1998); and “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation by K.N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin”, by Raphael Carter (Tiptree). For efficiency, I may write up all three in the same blog post.
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Thu, 15:02: RT @davidallengreen: “Mon centre c�de, ma droite recule, situation excellente, j’attaque.”
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Current The Complete Secret Army: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Classic TV Drama Series by Andy Priestner Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens The Nightmare Stacks, by Charles Stross The Tiger's Wife, by Tea Obreht
Last books finished Roger of Hereford’s Judicial Astrology: England’s First Astrology Book?, by Chris Mitchell The Accident, by Ismail Kadarë Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime 1: Breaking the Strain, by Paul Preuss
Next books The Queen's Spymaster, by John Cooper The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, by Stephen Fry
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Wed, 22:21: RT @rtenews: The UK paper on implementing the Protocol skirts as close to the rocks of EU disapproval as possible. But it may have just don…
The troopship was a converted “cattlewagon” made to carry two hundred colonists and assorted bushes and beasts. Don’t think it was roomy, though, just because there were half that many of us. Most of the excess space was taken up with extra reaction mass and ordnance.
When I last read this in 2003, I wrote (WARNING – SPOILERS):
William Mandella is a physics graduate, drafted in the year 1997 to fight an interstellar war against the unknown Tauran enemy. Because the battlefields themselves are light-years away, Mandella spends most of the book slipping forward into the future thanks to time dilation, and thus becoming progressively more alienated from the society which he was recruited to serve. But he falls in love with a fellow soldier (the army of 1997 and later years being gender-balanced) and despite all obstacles they get back together. The book ends with a birth announcement from the happy couple – a narrative closure which is also used by Mary Gentle at the end of her medieval fantasy war novel, Ash: A Secret History.
The sequences portraying life as a soldier, in training or in a combat situation, are gripping and unforgettable. Haldeman has put a lot of his experiences as an actual soldier in the Vietnam war into the book. William is his own middle name, and Mandella almost an anagram of Haldeman (see his interview with Spaced Out, the Australian gay and lesbian sf club). Mandella’s lover has Haldeman’s wife’s maiden name, Marygay Potter. The two colossal strengths of the book are the portrayal of the psychological experience of combat, and the depiction of the progressive alienation of the soldiers from the rest of humanity, culminating in the awful revelation that the war was basically a mistake.
As a civilian veteran of Balkan and Irish conflicts myself, I’m not unfamiliar with the psychological effects of war on the participants, and Haldeman gets it right. In a sense the protagonists of The Forever War are relatively fortunate in that there seem to be very few civilian casualties directly resulting from the conflict. Not that they see it that way, as the casualty rate among military participants is huge, and our hero gains rapid promotion merely for staying alive (though as a highly intelligent graduate he must have been officer material anyway). (Brandon Ray subsequently pointed out on rec.arts.sf.written that this isn’t necessarily so, since all the recruits were enlisted by the Elite Conscription Act.)
The military stuff seemed well thought out. I particularly liked the gimmick of the stasis field, within with electricity doesn’t work so our soldiers have to resort to edged weapons. The science behind it may well be rubbish but the military implications were sensibly developed. (And anyone who doubts that the military could possibly jump at shadows to such an extent as to wage war against an enemy that wasn’t in fact an enemy should consider such recent events as the US military’s hysterical reaction to the International Criminal Court and its bizarre fixation with National Missile Defense, a project that will cost vast amounts of money to defend against a threat that is vanishingly unlikely to transpire.)
However despite the undeniable power of the core message of the book, much of the packaging is flawed. The book begins in a world where interstellar space travel has been developed by 1997, which now seems optimistically premature to the 21st century reader. The first edition, which actually won the Hugo and Nebula awards, features a section set in a future Geneva where the UN is now based – a Geneva where the local population has suddenly started speaking German! And although there may some day be a gender-balanced army which tolerates soft drug use, encourages other ranks to say “Fuck you, Sir!” to officers, and enforces (hetero)sexual activity among its recruits, this seems as unlikely now as it must have done in 1975.
The book’s biggest problem – and this has often been acknowledged by Haldeman – is its handling of sexuality. In a year when Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, and Robert Silverberg’s The Stochastic Man were pushing the boundaries of the portrayal of sex in science fiction, The Forever War‘s take on the issue seems rather unimaginative. The 1997 army enforces one-on-one heterosexual activity, with daily rotation of partners, among its personnel, none of whom appear to be particularly upset by this. A few decades later, the entire world has become homosexual as a means of population control, which seems rather disproportionate. Mandella sticks to his heterosexual guns, and does not appear in the least tempted to try it the other way (unlike the hero of Frederik Pohl’s Gateway which also won both Hugo and Nebula, two years later).
And the ending, where our hero retrieves his lost love while the rest of the human race has surrendered its identity to a race of bisexual telepathic clones, seemed to me on first reading simply silly. I may be being unfair to the author here. Haldeman retorts in the introduction to “A Separate War”, in the Robert Silverberg-edited collection Far Horizons, that:
The Forever War does not have a happy ending. Marygay and William do get back together – the book ends with the birth announcement of their first child – but they’re together on a prison planet, preserved as genetic curiosities in a universe where the human race has abandoned its humanity in a monstrous liaison with its former enemy.
That’s all very well as an explanation (twenty years on) of what was in the author’s mind when he wrote it, but it doesn’t really come across on the printed page of the book where the happy ending appears to be the point of the narrative. And it isn’t sufficient, to this reader anyway, to justify the proliferation of homosexuality followed by the telepathic clones as a part of the metaphor for the alienation of Mandella from the rest of the human race; by today’s standards this is either naive or offensive.
To an extent we should forgive the book its anachronisms; we still enjoy Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar even though his depiction of Roman life (with clocks, hats and doublets) is rather different from ours. The flaws are real, but the passion is real as well. The Forever War is not a timeless classic, but it is a classic of its own time, and will no doubt continue to be read for its passion rather than its predictive accuracy. And after all, sf would be a very boring (and small) genre if it was actually rated on its ability to predict the future!
I can’t find whether the novel was published before or after the fall of Saigon in April 1975, but the experience of the Vietnam War of course crucially informed the Zeitgeist. I have to say that going back to it now, I found the book’s take on gender and sexuality so far off kilter that it is difficult to see past that to the intended core message on the dehumanising effects of conflict. I guess we are all better educated about sexual consent now, and while the army’s enforcement of sexual behaviour among the troops may be meant to satirically highlight the pointlessness of trying to enforce sexual abstinence, it completely misses the mark. And it’s impossible to ignore that the first step that the human race takes away from “normal” humanity is to become almost entirely homosexual. What message does that send to the LGBT community about the story’s view of their humanity? I don’t think I could recommend this to anyone starting to read SF in 2020. But if you want, you can get it here.
Three of the other novels on the 1975 Hugo final ballot were also on the Nebula final ballot that year. They were Doorways in the Sand, by Roger Zelazny; The Computer Connection, by Alfred Bester; and The Stochastic Man, by Robert Silverberg. I have read all three and frankly I like all three better than The Forever War, though all have their flaws and I’m not sure how I would have voted. The other Hugo finalist was Inferno, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, which I have not read.
The (long) 1974 Nebula ballot included another five that I have read, The Mote in God’s Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle; Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany; The Female Man, by Joanna Russ; Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino; and Missing Man, by Katherine MacLean; and nine that I haven’t, A Midsummer Tempest, by Poul Anderson; A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire, by Michael Bishop; The Heritage of Hastur, by Marion Zimmer Bradley; Autumn Angels, by Arthur Byron Cover; Ragtime, by E. L. Doctorow; The Birthgrave, by Tanith Lee; Guernica Night, by Barry N. Malzberg; The Exile Waiting, by Vonda N. McIntyre; and The Embedding, by Ian Watson. In retrospect it seems a real error to have overlooked The Female Man.
As previously noted, the Hugo and Nebula voters concurred in two of the other three fiction categories. “Home Is the Hangman” by Roger Zelazny won both Best Novella awards, and “Catch that Zeppelin!” by Fritz Leiber won Best Short Story. The Hugo for Best Novelette went to “The Borderland of Sol” by Larry Niven, and the Nebula to “San Diego Lightfoot Sue” by Tom Reamy.
Going forward in my reviews of works that won both Hugo and Nebula, I think I’ll take it a year at a time rather than a work at a time. So the next entry in this series will feature two rather different stories, “The Bicentennial Man” by Isaac Asimov and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” by James Tiptree, Jr., which both won awards presented in 1977 for work of 1976.
Tue, 19:10: RT @carneross: 16 years after founding it, I will be stepping down as Executive Director of Independent Diplomat @IDiplomat in June. I’m d…
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Wed, 10:45: RT @IanaDreyer: 1/ Some thoughts on UK draft text tabled to the EU today + @DavidGHFrost letter It is understandable, and even desirable f…
One problem with our donors was that several of them were not only financiers of the process but also had interests in its outcome, whether those were pressures from past and potential investors in the DRC or concerns about the cost and availability of suitable troops to deploy as peace-keepers. Thus three of them, the USA, France and the UK, were permanent members of the Security Council and one, Belgium was the former colonial power. Within the EU, our largest donor for the first two years, some officials clearly felt it should have more say in the process. As South Africa later assumed a more prominent role, voices were raised to claim that South Africa was not entirely disinterested either: their mining companies could profit greatly from the Congo's minerals. Such pressures are of course a reality of peace-making within the framework available today. While we were resisting external suggestions which we did not feel were consistent with our brief, we were also clearly failing to inspire confidence.
Philip Winter is one of the most interesting people I have ever worked with. During my Independent Diplomat days, he was our representative in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, from late 2010, just before the independence referendum, until it all went wrong at the end of 2013. While we were colleagues he kindly presented me with a copy of this book, which was published in 2012 but written several years before. Shamefully, I have only now got around to reading it. It was worth the wait.
The Inter-Congolese Dialogue doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, though there is one for the peace agreement with which it ended. As part of the process of winding down the awful Second Congo War, in which millions lost their lives through violence and related factors, the Congolese regime of Laurent-Désiré Kabila agreed reluctantly to find a joint government structure along with the groups that it had been fighting. Kabila himself then did his best to prevent the dialogue process from getting started, but was assassinated by his own guards early in 2001. His son Joseph, then aged 29, was rapidly chosen as his successor and engaged sufficiently for the factions to find a solution acceptable to most of the parties (and eventually accepted by all of them) in April 2002. Philip Winter was hired by the British government to work as chief of staff to the facilitator of the process, the former President of Botswana Sir Ketumile Masire, and tells the inside story of a mission which initially a lot of players did not want or did not understand, and which eventually came to be the focal point of international diplomacy in the whole of southern Africa.
It's a personal account which barely scrapes the surface of the actual content of the agreement, and assumes that the reader already has significant background knowledge of the Congo conflict (which I did, mainly thanks to the work of another former colleague from those days, Gérard Prunier). However, it is a very good account of the inside workings of the process, taking very much the anthropological perspective that I find sympathetic – diplomacy revolves as much around personalities and pressure from above and below as it does on the actual substance. There are effective, brief pen-portraits of the team led by Sir Ketumile Masire (QM to his friends) and some of the other protagonists as well. One interesting aspect is that QM and most of his team (and most of the other relevant African leaders) were anglophone, while the parties to the conflict were mostly francophone. Various means were found to get around this, including that Philip's own French is good enough for diplomatic work.
The story has a conclusion, in that the parties do reach the Sun City Agreement, but not an ending, as the implementation of the agreement was far from unproblematic and lower-level armed conflict continues to rumble on. There are some very important insights. Reaching an agreement was not inevitable, and there were several moments when the whole thing appeared to be about to crash – an important factor often being the international community hinting at a lack of faith in QM personally. The mediators pushed as hard as they could for greater inclusion of women in the process, but they could not push very hard and the results on that score were meagre. Philip goes into the reasons for the successes in some detail – basically, very careful preparation for the few key meetings that took place, the first of which was in Gaborone in August 2001, a continued emphasis on African and Congolese ownership, and constant transparency and clarity with the one set of stakeholders who really mattered, the parties to the conflict.
I twitched when several other people who I know personally popped up in the narrative – François Grignon, who was a colleague of mine at the International Crisis Group and is now the UN Deputy Representative in DR Congo; Claudia Wiedey-Nippold, now a senior Africanist in the EU External Action Service; Annemie Neyts, now retired but then a Belgian government minister. There is a lovely moment near the end where Philip introduces the rest of his team, most of whom were from Botswana, to the Alexander McCall Smith novels of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. The Batswana really got into them, and actually took a break from diplomacy one afternoon to go and hear McCall Smith do a reading.
It reminded me of another book by another former colleague, Collision Course, John Norris's account of the US negotiations over the Kosovo peace agreement in 1999. There are important differences. Not least, A Sacred Cause covers a longer period of time (three years rather than three months). Philip puts himself in the picture more than John. But he is also painting a wider picture – where John was working for one of the belligerents (the USA), Philip was in a sense working for them all. A really interesting read. You can get it here.
This was the last unread book on my shelves acquired in 2012. (I read the last book acquired in 2011 last October, the last book acquired in 2010 in January last year, and the last book acquired in 2009 at the end of 2016.) This opens up my 2013 lists: Yugoslavia's Implosion, by Sonja Biserko (non-fiction in order of acquisition), Local Hero, by David Benedictus (shortest unread book acquired in 2013), The Ghost of Lily Painter, by Caitlin Davies (non-genre fiction in order of acquisition), Heaven's War, by David S Goyer (sf in oder of acquisition) and Laatste Schooldag: Verhalen, by J. G Siebelink (most popular unread book acquired in 2013).
Mon, 12:56: RT @PersianPoetics: Thread: The Orientalizing of Moulana Rumi Many of you may be familiar with the ‘Rumi quotes’ that circulate the intern…
Mon, 20:05: RT @JP_Biz: Very much enjoying the new government line which is ‘Guys, we’ve always super clear that the Brexit deal was going to mean chec…
The big family event of June 2006 was my great-aunt’s 90th birthday. Here she is with her four children (the four on the left, with her sister-in-law) and her eight nieces and nephews, including my mother (whose face is unfortunately obscured). Three of the people in the picture are sadly no longer with us, but my great-aunt is still going strong and expects to turn 104 next month. (Picture taken by my sister.)
Two of the pictures from my own camera show the guest of honour and the youngest guest, young F, and me with my siblings.
The other family birthday that month was B’s ninth. The big present was a crocodile-shaped water sprinkler, which all three children hugely enjoyed.
Here is a rare video (well, compilation of several short videos) of the three kids together, B just 9, F about to turn 7 and U at 3½:
Apart from that, I see I went to the Tun on 1 June so must have been in London, was in Thessalonica for a meeting with the SEERC later in the month, attended a Wilton Park conference, and seem to have ended the month with a visit to Paris. At work we published a report on the Preševo Valley of Southern Serbia. My Greek intern K was replaced by Macedonian E. (They both now work for the European Commission.) And I wrote what turned out to be the last of my mega-meta-reviews of that year’s Hugo finalists. (It wasn’t possible the following year, for reasons which will become clear, and by 2008 other channels had taken over.) This was also the month that I started really getting into the Big Finish Doctor Who audios.
4,700 pages (YTD 23,300)
3/16 by women (YTD 11/73)
none by PoC (YTD 3/73)
The two really good ones here are Zoran Živković's collection of short stories, which you can get here, and Emma Crewe's anthropological stody of the House of Lords, which you can get here. I found The Triumph of the West pretty pointless, but you can get it here.
Sun, 12:56: ‘The past six weeks have been unlike anything I’ve known’: a GP on how the pandemic has changed his work… https://t.co/c5GGfm6CEv
Sun, 13:37: RT @nwbrux: Everyone, ignore the Mail on Sunday. I know it makes you angry. But channel your energy into something better. All you are doin…
Sun, 14:48: RT @kleine_m: This is messed up BBC. Germany makes defiling of foreign flags punishable (after an Israeli flag was burned), and this is the…
Sun, 20:06: RT @jamesmoran: Karen Gillan’s first appearance in Who! I had NO idea she’d come back later as Amy, and NO idea Peter Capaldi would come ba…
Sun, 20:07: Alas, @BSFA awards are delayed until probably after my bedtime. So on the bright side I’m doing the Doctor rewatch… https://t.co/cwFmXGyfoH
Sun, 20:08: RT @jamesmoran: Had a weird out of body moment when I visited the studio. Standing in the villa, full 360 set, talking to David about how n…
Sun, 20:09: RT @jamesmoran: One of my favourite stories is “City of Death”, so there’s a deliberate reference to that – Caecilius buys the TARDIS, thin…
Sun, 20:09: RT @Emily_Rosina: My housemate is very confused to see Peter Capaldi in this episode… “I thought this was a David Tennant one. What’s he…
Sun, 20:19: RT @jamesmoran: When Russell’s rewrite came back, it had all this “returning” and “something on your back” serial stuff for later in the se…
Sun, 20:19: RT @jamesmoran: You can thank Russell for the Welsh gags and the water pistol too – even though when he rewrites, he copies your style, it’…
Sun, 20:20: RT @jamesmoran: The biggest challenge was, what can the Doctor do? He can’t stop the eruption, it really happened. So you spin it around -…
Sun, 20:22: RT @difficultstage: Now, according to The Writer’s Tale that toga I have on was the subject of many a meeting…unbeknownst to me! #VOLCANO…
Sun, 20:25: RT @jamesmoran: I was on set for this big scene where the Pyrovile comes out of the vent (CGI creature not present at the time…) The vill…
Sun, 20:27: RT @MegReeves93: Donna had some of the best one liners, honestly. “You may have eyes on the back of your hands, but you’ll have eyes on th…
Sun, 20:29: RT @thirtccnthdocto: I freaked out when the curtain showed who was behind it. I also freaked out when the creature began to speak. But I wa…
Sun, 20:32: Donna Noble: But I’m history, too. You saved me in 2008, saved all of us. Why is that different? The Doctor: Some t… https://t.co/alI9rp9wfR
Sun, 20:33: RT @MaxKowarth: #VolcanoDay the ultimate ethos of the revival. The Doctor needs companions to tell him the truth (not just to get in troubl…
Sun, 20:34: RT @jamesmoran: It’s true, they didn’t have a word for “volcano” – they had no idea what was happening. The earthquake that Caecilius menti…
Sun, 20:35: RT @jamesmoran: “The most terrible choice…” I’m basically stealing from Genesis of the Daleks, one of my favourite stories. Forcing him t…
Sun, 20:35: RT @jamesmoran: I’d seen concept sketches of the creatures, but nothing more until the finished ep- I watched it on a tiny screen in a cupb…
Sun, 20:37: RT @jamesmoran: The lever bit always makes me cry, even now, as does Donna’s pleading later. Quite late at outline stage, I added in that D…
Sun, 20:39: RT @jamesmoran: The Doctor says 20,000 people died – we can’t be sure exactly how many, but 20,000 people did live there, and it’s thought…
Sun, 20:42: RT @jamesmoran: When Donna is shouting “don’t go to the beach, go to the hills” she’s trying to save lives – many people thought they’d be…
Sun, 20:44: RT @TraceyChilds50: #VOLCANODAY I NEVER actually went inside our modern artwork, the TARDIS. I managed to avoid stepping through those icon…
Mon, 07:30: RT @BSFA: Winner of The BSFA Award for Best Shorter Fiction: Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone – This is How You Lose the Time War (Jo Fletch…
Mon, 07:30: RT @BSFA: Winner of the BSFA Award for Best Non-Fiction: Farah Mendlesohn – The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein (Unbound)
Mon, 07:31: RT @BSFA: Winner of the BSFA Award for Best Artwork: Chris Baker (Fangorn) – Cover for ‘Wourism and Other Stories’ by Ian Whates (Luna Pre…
Mon, 07:31: RT @BSFA: Winner of the BSFA Award for Best Novel: Adrian Tchaikovsky – Children of Ruin (Tor)
Mon, 08:40: RT @alexstubb: My short read. Process: 1. Crisis. 2. Chaos. 3. Sub-optimal solution. Players: 1. Commission. 2. Member states. 3. Europ…
The Godfather won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1972, and picked up another two – Best Actor, which was declined by Marlon Brando in protest at the treatment of Native Americans at Wounded Knee (and elsewhere); and Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. James Caan, Robert Duvall and Al Pacino were all nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but lost to Joel Grey as the MC in Cabaret. There were three other categories where The Godfather lost to Cabaret, which still holds the record for the most Oscars for any film that did not also win Best Picture.
The other Best Picture nominees were Cabaret, Deliverance, The Emigrants and SounderCabaret is the only other of the nominees that I’ve seen. 1972 is not a good year for my cinematic education; I am pretty sure that the only other two films I’ve seen from that year are Slaughterhouse-Five (which I’ll get to next, as it won the Hugo) and the very odd Lee Marvin/Sissy Spacek film Prime Cut. I’d rate The Godfather as the best of them, though Cabaret is also very good. IMDB users also rank it top film of 1972 on bothrankings.
Here’s a trailer.
We are in the middle of a crime wave at the Oscars at the moment, having just had The French Connection, Midnight Cowboy, Oliver! and arguably A Man for All Seasons, with The Sting and The Godfather II coming next. It’s the story of Vito Corleone, boss of a massive organised crime network, and his son Michael who eventually takes over the family business. There is an awful lot of graphic violence. It’s another story about white men. But it’s really well told – I am struck by just how different I found it to Patton, made by the same director only two years before – and I’m putting it in the top third of my list, just below Oliver! but ahead of Ben-Hur. I had seen it once before, but I enjoyed the return visit.
The major returning actor from a previous Oscar winner is Brando himself, who also won Best Actor eighteen years ago for the lead role in On the Waterfront. Here he is iconically and convincgly made up to look like a Mafia grandfather and godfather. (The actors playing his sons are between six and sixteen years younger than him.)
Another returnee from On the Waterfront is Rudy Bond, who is Cuneo here (one of the other Mafia dons), and played Moose (one of the longshoremen) in the earlier film.
Sonny Grosso, whose story was the basis for last year’s The French Connection and also appeared in it, plays to type again and is a briefly seen New York cop, but not seen clearly enough for me to put a picture here. And we have an actor from a Hugo-winning film, Sterling Hayden who is Captain McCluskey here and was General Jack D. Ripper in Dr Strangelove.
There are also a fair number of actors here who we will see again in future Oscar-winning films – not least (but not only) because the sequel comes up in two years’ time.
This is yet another film about white men, as was Patton. I was feeling ill the day I watched it, so I did not keep track as closely as usual, but I don’t think that there were many visible non-white faces and I don’t think there were any non-white speaking parts. To an extent the Italians and Jews, and even perhaps the Irish, are to be understood as non-Anglo-Saxons, but it’s not quite the same thing. Going back for another look, I did spot the stable hand who shows off the unfortunate Sultan.
The women are entirely present in terms of their relations with the men – the film obviously passes Bechdel One, in that there is more than one named female character, but I am not sure that it hits Bechdel Two (do any of them have an audible conversation with each other?) and definitely not Bechdel Three (the conversation is not about a man). Having said that, Michael’s two wives are both pretty memorable. Simonetta Stefanelli absolutely glows in her few scenes as Apollonia, and Diane Keaton’s Kay is sort of an Anglo-Saxon viewpoint character (we will of course see her again soon).
And yet, it’s a really well put together film. The plot is complex, with a lot of characters running around shooting each other, mostly in New York but also farther west and in Italy, but I found no difficulty whatsoever in keeping track of it all. The script is lucid and the cinematography adds to the story without distracting from it. “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” is an unforgettable line (used in several variations). The acting nominations were all well deserved – Brando as the title charcter, Al Pacino and James Caan as his sons Michael and Sonny, and Robert Duvall as the conigliere Tom Hagen. Brando in particular carries his character’s extra years effortlessly.
And the music is just tremendous. Here’s a vid with the orchestral suite (including most of the good bits) set to some of the Sicilian scenes from the film:
Despite its flaws, I think this is a better film than Cabaret – the characters have more depth, there is more going on and the story is told better – and it deserved the Oscar that year. You can get it here.
Next up: The Sting.
I had also read the book long ago, and went back to it for comparative purposes. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
It was a short ride, not more than twenty minutes and when they got out of the car Hagen could not recognize the neighborhood because darkness had fallen. They led him into a basement apartment and made him sit on a straight-backed kitchen chair. Sollozzo sat across the kitchen table from him. His dark face had a peculiarly vulturine look.
The book is a cracking good read. The film sticks pretty closely to the parts of the original story that it wants to tell, but there are two significant (and enjoyable) sections that are not in the film – the adventures of Johnny Fontane in Hollywood, and the back story of Vito Corleone in Sicily and his early years in New York (though I think the latter thread informs the Robert de Niro sections of the sequel film). The book has space to go a bit deeper into the political economy of organised crime, in particular the role played (or not) by the police. It’s also a bit better on the women characters (though this is not saying a lot), and has much more explicit sex than I remembered from reading it as a teenager. I can’t pretend that it’s a very deep read, but it’s a very interesting juxtaposition with last year’s The French Connection which also looked at organised crime in New York, from a rather different perspective. You can get it here.
Sat, 12:56: RT @QUBelfast: Conflict & Change: A Conversation with Rory Montgomery & Jonathan Powell Join Prof Richard English as he leads the conversa…
Well, we are partially back in the office. We have a strict rota – open Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; nobody does more than two days in a week; ten to twelve people each day (of a total strength of 49); only those who have actually asked to return have returned. We have proved we can work from home if we have to, the numbers are robust, but I was one of those who felt the need to recolonise our working space for general mental wellbeing.
I must say I found it very helpful to hang out with colleagues in real life rather than virtually. I am senior enough to have my own room to work from, but some of my equipment is at home and difficult to move safely, so I co-opted another desk in the open seating area and actually rather enjoyed myself. None of the people who I work with particularly closely had opted to come in this week, but that meant that I was able to get to know a couple of other colleagues a little better, including one chap who had only started as the lockdown was coming in.
We still have not been able to see our own daughters. Visits are now permitted, but under conditions that are basically unworkable (no touching, maintain 1.5 metre distance). Still, the trends are in the right direction. Today's numbers are again encouraging – 1750 in hospital, 364 in intensive care, 57 new fatalities, which are about half way between the corresponding numbers for 23 March (1883/385/78) but still some way above 22 March (1646/322/41), when the initial curve was particularly steep.
I am still in the fortunate position that anyone I know at all well who has had the COVID-19 virus has recovered or seems to be recovering. But there has been a grim toll in some people's families. One friend told me how she went straight from an international conference of health specialists in Brussels in early March to visit her mother in the UK. They both went down with the virus (which my friend reckons she caught at the conference). My friend got better; her mother did not. She's not the only person I know who has lost a close relative, but it's a particularly dreadful case.
Which brings me to today's real significance for me; it is the thirtieth anniversary of my father's death, aged 62, from a heart attack sustained while changing planes in John F. Kennedy Airport. He lingered for a few days but did not regain consciousness. At the age of 20 he had had the awful experience of seeing his own father, then aged 67, drop dead stading beside him in church. My other grandfather also died of a suddent heart attack in his sixties, and I need not spell out the conclusions that I have drawn for myself.
Whe he died, my father had just put the finishing touches to his last book, Interpreting Northern Ireland, in which he analysed the pros and cons of various ideological and methodological ways of examining the Nothern Ireland. He quipped that "It is quite possible that, in proportion to size, Northern Ireland is the most heavily researched area on earth." His first book, Church and State in Modern Ireland, set the agenda for the analysis of mid-twentieth-century Irish politics for a generation, and is still taken as a baseline for today's researchers even if they don't always agree with it.
He was not only an analyst. In a June 1971 pamphlet on The Reform of Stormont, written for the New Ulster Movement, he proposed five key reforms: proportional representation for elections, stronger parliamentary committees, more members of the Stormont Parliament, a reformed Northern Ireland Senate and proportional representation of the political parties in government. Four of these became hardwired into the Sunningdale Agreement in 1973 and later the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The Northern Ireland Senate was abolished rather than being reformed, though the suggestions survive in spirit in the Civic Forum/Civic Advisory Panel. As far as I know, my father was the first to advocate most of these ideas in the Northern Ireland context (apart from proportional elections, a discussion which is older than Partition), and I think he deserves more credit than he has received for originating them.
He would have been encouraged, frustrated and fascinated by the way the world has changed in the last thirty years. He would also have loved being a father-in-law and grandfather, and of course that is where we miss him the most. He packed a lot of love and guidance into the 23 years that I knew him, and I wish there had been more of those years.
A spectacle, certainly, and as an early palace of industry clearly worthy of the guidebooks (themselves novelties). By any stretch of the imagination, though, the Manufacture des Tabacs was an odd place to look for someone who would become the most celebrated mathematical astronomer of his day—but not everyone follows a straight course to the person they might become. Thus it was that in 1833 a young man, freshly minted as a graduate of the celebrated École polytechnique, could be found every working day at the Quai d'Orsay, reporting for duty at the research arm of the factory, France's École des Tabacs.
A nice little study of two very different parts of astronomical history: first, the mid-nineteenth century quest for the planet Vulcan, and then the story of Einstein's conceptualisation of General Relativity and the practical test during the eclipse of 1919, which confirmed it. I had touched on this issue during my MPhil research on Sir Robert Ball, so it was a nice return to a previous topic. Levenson gets very much into the context of the two different situation, particularly vivid on Le Verrier in Paris in the 1830s and Einstein's early career. I felt he didn't quite bridge the two – I'd have liked a bit more on the noted astronomer James Craig Watson who actually claimed to have seen Vulcan during the solar eclipse of 1878, and the book ends up being very firmly two different stories with a common topic of interest but which are otherwise not that closely related. But both stories are interesting. You can get it here.
Thu, 16:40: RT @cybertechaccord: Products that are connected to a network are called the “internet of things” or “IoT” and they are here to stay. Hacke…
Thu, 17:11: EU diplomats face the enemy within https://t.co/s3gDYLcF4X Vimont speaks out – fascinating if you have been following the EEAS’s troubles.
Thu, 18:45: RT @DougSaunders: In France, it’s currently possible for a woman simultaneously to be fined €165 for being in public with a face covering a…
Thu, 20:48: How plagues change the world https://t.co/6YcXS6Ta47 A historical perspective: what were the effects of the 14th-century Black Death?
Thu, 21:51: RT @bbcdoctorwho: Father’s Day aka the day that Rose tore a hole in the fabric of the universe is 15 years old today! #DoctorWho https://t.…
Fri, 09:19: “If the 21st century turns out to be an Asian century as the 20th was an American one, the pandemic may well be rem… https://t.co/AQJxYwwfN9
Fri, 10:45: RT @MatthewOToole2: Remarkable thing I’ve discovered: NI is spending millions subsidising long haul air travel despite not having a single…
Current The Complete Secret Army: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Classic TV Drama Series by Andy Priestner The Accident, by Ismail Kadarë Roger of Hereford’s Judicial Astrology: England’s First Astrology Book?, by Chris Mitchell Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime 1: Breaking the Strain, by Paul Preuss Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens
Last books finished A Sacred Cause: The Inter-Congolese Dialogue 2000-2003, by P. E. Winter The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman Black Wine, by Candas Jane Dorsey The Godfather, by Mario Puzo
Next books The Nightmare Stacks, by Charles Stross The Tiger's Wife, by Tea Obreht
Wed, 23:19: RT @Hugo_Book_Club: In 1964, #Zelazny was the 2nd-youngest to have written a Hugo-shortlisted work. He was 27 years, 4 months when he was o…
Thu, 10:45: RT @Donal_OKeeffe: I understand that Gemma O’Doherty and John Waters will, for the first time in their lives, be appealing. https://t.co/nO…
The third entry in this compilation of comic strips, in full (by Tony Millionaire, whose work I don't otherwise know and frankly this doesn't encourage me to seek it out):
About a year and a half ago I went both to the permanent exhibiton of the Charles M Schulz museum in California, and to a temporary exhibition of his work in London. I bought this while I was in Santa Rosa; it's a collection of pieces paying tribute to Schulz's work, some of them very personal – one or two of the artists were lucky enough to meet or know Schulz himself, and most of them have some thoughtful things to say about the Peanuts strip, which was pretty progressive for its time. To call attention to a couple of them, Jeremy Sorese has an interesting meditation on where the adults are in the Peanuts universe; Liz Prince explores the Peppermint Patty/Marcia relationship; and Hilary Price recalls a magical afternoon in Santa Rosa. It's a lovely book (apart as noted above from the Tony Millionaire contribution, which really misses the mark) and you can get it here.
This was my top unread comic in English. Next on that list is a Doctor Who comic, Gaze of the Medusa, by Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby and Brian Williamson.
Tue, 12:56: RT @jackiantonovich: Sarah Michelle Gellar wearing her Prophecy Girl dress from the season 1 finale of Buffy is the quarantine gift we all…
Tue, 19:09: Here’s the Quartier Leopold, ie the EU quarter of Brussels, filmed in 1978, pretending to be the 1943 setting of UK… https://t.co/mQuF8oY3OW
A month when I visited Berlin and London for work, and I have a note that I was in Bath too, but am really not sure why. (Anne's birthday fell in the middle of my Berlin trip, so we must have celebrated at the weekend.) I also got a really weird phone call from someone who felt it really important to tell me that "je suis" is "Jesus" with "I" in the middle. At work, I took some time off Crisis Group to do a chunky bit of consulting for my future employers Independent Diplomat. I also applied for a job with the European Commission, but it was one of those cases where they were really formalising someone's existing job and the advertisement was not serious.
As the fine weather came in, U and F dressed up, and B climbed a tree.
The big geopolitical news was Montenegro voting for independence, and its subsequent peaceful separation from Serbia. I still feel rather proud that I helped make the argument for Montenegro as an independent state to EU policymakers long before it became fashionable.
This was also the month that I had my infamous exhange with John Scalzi over his novel Old Man’s War (see here, here, here and here). We are friends now (picture from last year’s Hugo ceremony).
3,300 pages (YTD 18,600)
1/15 by a woman (YTD 8/57)
1/15 by PoC (YTD 3/57)
Links above to my reviews, below to Amazon.
Lots of good books here, but the two I enjoyed most were both non-fiction, Moondust, about the Apollo astronoauts, which you can get here, and Echoes from the Dead Zone, a Cypriot anthropologist's take on his island's problems, which you can get here. On the other hand, two of these books were so awful that, unusually, I could not finish them, Ivanhoe being slightly the worse of the two. You can get it here, if you want.
