- What was fake on the Internet this week: Why this is the final column
The untruths are too painful.
- Give Up Yer Aul Sins
Absolutely charming!
- 23 Reminders That Every 23-Year-Old Needs To Hear Right Now
A lot of it sound advice at any age!
- [Review] The Hunger Tower by Pan Haitian
A really bad story, reviewed.
Insomnia and smartphones
Like a lot of people, I have occasional battles with insomnia. The advent of the smartphone has made things worse. Whereas in the old days, you could pick up a book to read in the dark hours and put it aside when your eyelids finally started drooping, the phone is insidious – Let's click through to that last update on Facebook or Twitter! Let's check the BBC or Guardian one last time! – and tends to keep you awake raher than lull you to rest. I am told (and I can well believe it) that the mere fact of the lighting makes it more difficult for the eyes of the reader to relax and go to sleep; I would also observe that looking at people exchanging their views on the Internet is sometimes not terribly relaxing.
I have found a partial solution, which has made a positive difference for me at least. A few weeks ago I installed the Sleep Cycle app on my iPhone (there are presumably equivalents for other platforms). It claims to measure your sleep quality by listening to your breathing. This is the graph it drew of my sleep last night:
Now, I actually thought I slept rather better last night than this implies; certainly I don't recall the moments of blurry consciousness around 0415 which the phone thinks I experinced. (Er, on a different topic, er, yesterday was an unusually sedentary day – I normally manage 7,000 steps between various stations, but was lucky with public transport despite the lack of new train services. 2,556 steps is pretty pathetic.)
Imperfect though the app's measurement is, it mitigates one of the psychological exacerbating factors of insomnia, where you lie awake worrying about how much the fact that you are lying awake will impact you at work and at home the next day. The knowledge that the app will measure your lack of sleep so precisely is in fact welcome reassurance that you don't need to worry about it so much, because the phone is measuring it.
The other thing is that because the app reminds you that it is running on the phone, it's another incentive to put the damn gadget down and try to go to sleep.
So, it may not work for everyone, and it may not work for you; I can only say that it's made a tangible difference for me.
#RetroHugos1941 Captain Future and the Space Emperor, by Edmond Hamilton
This marks the end of my project to get up to speed with the sf novels of 1940, and it's a reasonably high note to finish on. This was the first of a couple of dozen stories featuring the eponymous Captain, who goes around the solar system righting wrongs – in this case, liberating the grateful natives of Jupiter from the evil Space Emperor – with his allies, a brain in a box formerly known as Simon Wright, a robot called Grag, and Android called Otho, and a spunky gal from the Planetary Police called Joan. It's pretty formulaic but done with great enthusiasm. In a week when I went for a drink with Captain Europe,
Links I found interesting for 19-12-2015
Links I found interesting for 18-12-2015
- Benefits man sanctioned by DWP for not looking for work while waiting to start work at.. the DWP
Attacking your own footsoldiers??
- The Shortest SF Story Ever, by Seth Chambers
Ow.
- First glimpse of lost library of Elizabethan polymath John Dee
Nice pictures.
- So you’d like to get into highbrow comics. Here’s where to start:
The Guardian recommends.
- New Schuman station opening postponed
Bah.
- New DUP chief Arlene Foster seeks ‘more harmonious’ society
Quotes CS Lewis and S Heaney.
Thursday reading
Current
None! For once, there are no open books. Though that will change when I go to bed.
Last books finished
The Reign of Wizardry, by Jack Williamson
The Gallifrey Chronicles, by Lance Parkin
Short Fiction Eligible for the 1941 Retro-Hugos Vol 4, ed. von Dimpleheimer
Fattypuffs and Thinifers, by Andre Maurois
Moon Over Soho, by Ben Aaronovitch
Helliconia Spring, by Brian Aldiss
The Whole and Rain-Domed Universe, by Colette Bryce
The Medusa Effect, by Justin Richards
Captain Future and the Space Emperor, by Edmond Hamilton
Next books
Helliconia Summer, by Brian Aldiss
Selected Stories, by Alice Munro
A Princess of Roumania, by Paul Park
Books acquired in last week
Captain Future and the Space Emperor, by Edmond Hamilton
Fattypuffs and Thinifers, by André Maurois
Splinters and the Impolite President, by William Whyte
The Kosovo Indictment, by Michael O'Reilly
Links I found interesting for 17-12-2015
- How to pinpoint the perfect EU staffer
Alex @yorksranter crunches the numbers on influence and gatekeeping.
- COP21: The Paris Agreement and What Lies Ahead
My @apcoworldwide colleagues look forward.
- Freddie Gray trial hung jury
Baltimore policing exposed.
#RetroHugos1941 The Reign of Wizardry, by Jack Williamson
I thought I was going to give up on the sf novels of 1940, but I’m glad I didn’t – this is a very competent retelling of the Greek legends of Theseus, with some parts of other legends thrown in, that rises to a cracking good conclusion. I don’t think it will (or necessarily even should) win a Retro Hugo but I’ll certainly give it one of my nomination slots.
Links I found interesting for 16-12-2015
- Dog DNA study reveals the incredible journey of man’s best friend
- The Weird, Sketchy History of Internet Cafes
How we have changed.
- The Call of the Sad Whelkfins: The Continued Relevance of How To Suppress Women’s Writing
@leeflower and @eilatan on the reception of Ancillary Justice
Links I found interesting for 15-12-2015
- The earliest samekh
A new-found ancient inscription. (Read the comments!)
- Putin’s popularity, explained
A sobering read.
- On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit (PDF)
Canadian research.
- ‘Blink’ Might Be Even More Timey-Wimey Than You Think
Interesting thought!
Between The Acts, by Virginia Woolf
I thought this was really excellent – a short novel written and set just before the second world war, published shortly after the author’s death by her own hand; on the surface, it’s a story of manners about a village pageant for Empire Day, but in fact there are deep currents of violence, both sexual and colonial, running through it and colouring everything that happens for the attentive reader. A really disturbing book in some ways. I’m becoming a bit of a fan.
When I Was a Child I Read Books, by Marilynne Robinson
A set of humane and sensible essays about America, Christian traditions, tolerance and learning. A useful antidote for a time when the crazy side has been getting a lot of airtime.
Links I found interesting for 14-12-2015
- Astronomers Skeptical about “Planet X” Claims
Harshing exoplanetary squee!
- EU Referendum: a humiliating retreat from journalism
@telegraph (and @independent) rubbish as usual.
- DNA links 5,500 year old remains of aboriginal woman in Canada with living relative
Linking now with the past.
- Andrew Duff writes to David Cameron to help out on Brexit
Getting technical.
- 15 Autism Myths People Affected by It Want to See Busted
Good thoughts.
- The Divorce Colony
Sioux Falls’ role in feminist history.
- I read the Eighth Doctor smut book (for science)
Niki does it so you don’t have to (though you may want to).
Keeping it Real, by Justina Robson
I thought this was really tremendous. I’ve read a lot of really bad books where the gateway between our own planet and the Faerie Otherworld opens up; this works really well because the basic fantasy premise is overlaid with a technothriller superstructure, where our cyborg heroine gets involved with dodgy technology transfer and music. I have generally liked Robson’s work and I loved this; I’m surprised it didn’t score in the 2006/07 awards season – perhaps too difficult to pigeonhole in terms of subgenre?
Happy 150th birthday, Jean Sibelius!
The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius was born on 8 December 1865, in a country then under Russian rule and undergoing a tremendous cultural awakening. He became a symbol of his country's independence struggle, and lived to 1957, forty years after independence. His lifespan was longer than any two of Schubert, Mozart, Bizet, Gershwin, Mendelssohn, Weber, Chopin and Schumann combined; but his creative period was constrained to the middle of his life, roughly from 1890 to 1926; in 1940 he notoriously burned all of his unpublished music in the fireplace of his home, Ainola.
I've loved his music since I was a teenager, and I just want to share a few pieces with you all for a weekend celebration, with perhaps a bit more context than is sometimes given. The first piece was composed in part as a protest against media censorship by the Russian regime, and first performed in 1900; the Russians found it so incendiary that it was often put on concert programmes with a disguised title. So it's not only a stirring piece of music in its own right, but a statement in favour of free speech. It is Finlandia.
Finlandia is not a choral work in its original form, but the melody of the last third has had numerous lyrics attached to it, including at least three different hymns in English. In Finland it's not the national anthem but it's one of the most important national songs. Sing along, if you like:
| Oi Suomi, katso, Sinun päiväs koittaa, yön uhka karkoitettu on jo pois, ja aamun kiuru kirkkaudessa soittaa kuin itse taivahan kansi sois. Yön vallat aamun valkeus jo voittaa, sun päiväs koittaa, oi synnyinmaa. Oi nouse, Suomi, nosta korkealle |
Finland, behold, thy daylight now is dawning, the threat of night has now been driven away. The skylark calls across the light of morning, the blue of heaven lets it have its way, and now the day the powers of night is scorning: thy daylight dawns, O Finland of ours! Finland, arise, and raise towards the highest |
Going back a bit, Sibelius' first hit was with the symphonic poem Kullervo, first performed in 1892, which is based on an episode from the Finnish national epic the Kalevala (also the subject of a recently published translation by J.R.R. Tolkien). The whole thing is well over an hour, but if you can spare seven minutes to listen to the start of the third movement, where Kullervo unknowingly encounters his sister, I think you'll find it worth your while:
A lot of Sibelius' music evokes Finnish nature and landscape, and one favourite short piece that seems to me to sum up spring coming to a frozen winter landscape is the Alla Marcia from the 1893 Karelia suite, (Karelia being the eastern part of Finland, mostly lost to the Soviet Union in the 1940s) which some may remember being used by Rik Mayall as the theme tune for his character Kevin Turvey:
I think this isn't the right place to post long extracts from the seven completed symphonies, but I love them all; a few fragmets of the uncompleted Eighth Symphony escaped the composer's attention and survived the 1940 fire, and they were clearly taking him in a very different direction:
I'll end with another Finnish mythological piece from Sibelius' early years, this from a suite of pieces about the life of the hero Lemminkäinen. In the story, Lemminkäinen has been tasked to travel to Tuonela, the island of the dead, to kill the swan which swims the boundary between two worlds (spoiler: he dies instead). As we all know, swans supposedly sing only on the brink of death; the Swan of Tuonela sings for ever, in the haunting tones of the cor anglais:
Happy birthday, sir.
Links I found interesting for 13-12-2015
- Ayn Rand’s The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
LOL!
- The Unbearable Lightness of America’s War Against the Islamic State
Home truths from @StephenWalt.
- Outstanding interactive maps of 2015
There are a lot of them.
- Paris silence on aviation and shipping casts doubt on who should lead
*wince*
- Welcome to Belfast, where bomb scares are part of daily life
Glenn Patterson reflects.
- Why the 2016 Election Will Be One of the Pivotal Moments of Our Time
A historical perspective.
The overnights meme
The overnights meme:
List the places where you spent a night away from home this year, marking places where you spent two or more non-consecutive nights with an asterisk.
(Just back from a week in the US and not planning to add any more, though I said that last year and then found myself doing one last international trip the weekend after Christmas!)
*London, England
*Sofia, Bulgaria
*Paris, France
Dublin, Ireland
*Belfast, Northern Ireland
Sulaimania, Iraq
*Belgrade, Serbia
Heathrow, England
*Loughbrickland, Northern Ireland
Kiev, Ukraine
Kotor, Montenegro
Podgorica, Montenegro
Zürich, Switzerland
Barcelona, Spain
Senningerberg, Luxembourg
Abuja, Nigeria
Portslade, England
*Kidderminster, England
Skopje, Macedonia
Abergavenny, Wales
Windsor, England
Geneva, Switzerland
Sandweiler, Luxembourg
Bruges, Belgium
Brussels, Belgium (office Christmas party!)
New York, NY, USA
Washington, DC, USA
That’s 28 places, a new record; also my first time visiting either Iraq or Nigeria.
Other countries visited without overnights:
Germany (transits to Bulgaria, Switzerland, and Luxembourg going the long way round, also day in Berlin)
Turkey (Iraq transit)
Poland (day in Warsaw and Ukraine transit)
Croatia (Montenegro transit)
Italy (Montenegro transit)
Total of 21 countries which again I think is a record for any single year since I started tallying. My lifetime total is now 53 (or 54 depending on the status of the Latrun Interchange and East Jerusalem).
Previous years: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006.
Links I found interesting for 12-12-2015
- Party mechanics: why Labour would struggle to oust Jeremy Corbyn
He’s there as long as he wants to be.
- On Anti-EU Lies and Retiring from Blogging
Thank you, @nosemonkey!
- The fascinating history of how Jefferson and other Founding Fathers defended Muslim rights
“It neither picks my pocket not breaks my leg.”
De Tweede Kus (Ringo / Martha / Hanne), by Conz
Conz (full name Constantijn van Cauwenberge) is one of the up and coming Flemish comics writers, so far untranslated into English as far as I can tell (you can get it in French as Quelque Part Les Étoiles, "Somewhere the Stars" rather than "The Second Kiss"). I first encountered him as author of one of the better shorts in Brussel in Beeldekes. Some smart Anglophone publisher should snap him up; this trilogy is a very nice Bildungsroman, set in Belgium and ten years later in Australia; viewpoint character Ringo (real name Maurice, but his two best friends are John and Paul) loves and loses Hanne over the summer that they finish high school in 1993, and in 2003 he finds her again in Sydney. But he has a long journey to get there, both physically and emotionally, and so does Hanne as it turns out; Ringo's mother, the titular Martha of the middle book of the trilogy, leads the pack of internal demons that he must overcome. Conz uses all the graphic novelist's techniques to convey the story, in paricular catching the very different atmospheres of Leuven (which I know well) and Sydney (where I've never been), most memorably conveying a road trip from Darwin across the interior of Australia. Well worth looking out for, if it appears in a language you can read.
Links I found interesting for 11-12-2015
- Tony de Brum: The emerging climate champion
Go @MinisterTdB – a fantastic guy who I loved working with!
- The Salty Truth About Ceres’ Mysterious Bright Spots
MgSO4!
- Brontë Sisters Power Dolls
Hooray!
- No vindication here. Only survival.
@peatworrier on the Alastair Carmichael verdict.
- EU court annuls Morocco trade deal over W Sahara
Hooray!
Thursday reading
Current
Moon Over Soho, by Ben Aaronovitch
Helliconia, by Brian Aldiss
The Gallifrey Chronicles, by Lance Parkin
The Reign of Wizardry, by Jack Williamson
Short Fiction Eligible for the 1941 Retro-Hugos Vol 4, ed. von Dimpleheimer
Last books finished
Short Fiction Eligible for the 1941 Retro-Hugos Vol 3, ed. von Dimpleheimer
Between The Acts, by Virginia Woolf
Keeping it Real, by Justina Robson
The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, by Kai Ashante Wilson
Instruments of Darkness, by Gary Russell
Witches of Lychford, by Paul Cornell
Sunset Mantle, by Alter S. Reiss
Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor
Last week’s audios
Welcome To Night Vale ep. 78
The Forsaken, by Justin Richards
Next books
Selected Stories, by Alice Munro
A Princess of Roumania, by Paul Park
The Medusa Effect, by Justin Richards
Books acquired in last week
Lavondyss, by Robert Holdstock
Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer
All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders
The Philosopher Kings, by Jo Walton
Ancillary Mercy, by Ann Leckie
Sex Criminals, Vol. 2: Two Worlds, One Cop, by Matt Fraction
Thor Volume 1: Goddess of Thunder, by Jason Aaron
Links I found interesting for 10-12-2015
- David Cameron’s cabinet saboteurs are pushing him to Brexit
Polly Toynbee, partisan but interesting.
- Azerbaijani Rights Activist Leyla Yunus Released From Prison
Hooray!
- The Men In The Castle: When the Political Gets Personal
“I was *not* the President’s lover. But I got fired.”
Waiting for Elizabeth, by Joan Rosier-Jones
A novel about a young man in the household of the Earl of Ormond during the 1570s and 1580s, which takes our hero to the major scenes of Anglo-Irish history of the period. It's not a brilliant book – you know where the plot is going, and even major twists are signalled far in advance – but an interesting attempt to convey what life was like in Ireland at the time; a benchmark should my own efforts in that direction ever bear fruit.
However, I think I'm going to be too busy with other things in the next couple of years to work on my ancestor, so I'm putting my Tudor history project aside for a bit.
Links I found interesting for 09-12-2015
- UK govt cuts a disability benefit that already leaves a third of recipients struggling to afford food
War on the disabled, again.
- An ordinary week in Serbia
Florian nails it.
- 5 Myths About the UN Human Rights Council
Setting the record straight.
- Donald Trump wants to ban the internet, will ask Bill Gates to ‘close it up’
Dear God.
- A Note on Trump: We Are No Longer Entertained
Arianna Huffington draws a line.
- The fall of Jersey: how a tax haven goes bust
Fascinating.
Babes in the Darkling Wood, by H.G. Wells
I got hold of this in hope that it might be a possible nominee for the 1941 Retro Hugos, given Wells' visibility in the genre. Alas, it has no sfnal elements at all, being set in England (with diversions to Sweden, Poland, Latvia and Finland) in 1939 and 1940, the story of a young couple coming of age together and separately, with lots of earnest dialogue about the future state of the world. I particularly liked the heroine, a student at Newnham, and slightly wondered why she put up with her slightly older lover who goes off to help the Russians and comes back with serious PTSD and the scales fallen from his eyes. I enjoyed the various scenes where Wells argues with himself in the voices of his own characters; he was often wrong but interestingly so. There is a lot of talk about sex, usually in the abstract. Wells called this his 'finest piece of work' and 'the book of my heart'; I'm not sure about the former, but the latter rings true. You can get it online from the Australian Project Gutenberg, here.
Links I found interesting for 08-12-2015
- The aviation and shipping industries, and the climate deal
A tricky equation.
- Why we stay up too late (in Dutch)
By @LieseExelmans (thx @JuliaNienaber).
- A History of Semi-Popular Philosophy of Mind
Interesting question with interesting answers.
- Belfast’s Strand cinema
Nostalgia!
- Addicted to Distraction
How the internet is crumbling our brains.
- 1977: Story of transgender pioneer Angela Morley as BBC radio play
Wow.
- 15 things I learnt about Islam and British values being a gay boy living opposite a mosque.
Bits of Me are Falling Apart, by William Leith
A short, somewhat grim account of being a middle aged man and feeling that life has completely passed you by. I’m classifying it as non-fiction because it’s presented as a memoir. Some of the observations were uncomfortably close to home, but in general I felt I’d had a better life than the writer and wasn’t learning much from this. It’s well written, though, the account of the circumstances around his son’s conception being especially gripping.
Links I found interesting for 07-12-2015
#RetroHugos1941 The Wonder City of Oz, by John R. Neill
I have got three novels to nominate for the Retro Hugos – The Ill-Made Knight, by T.H. White; Kallocain, by Karin Boye; and Twice in Time, by Manly Wade Wellman; I’m not nominating either Slan or Gray Lensman, though I think they are certain to feature on the list. I’m still looking for a fourth or fifth, having rejected also Henry Kuttner’s A Million Years To Conquer.
This won’t help fill the gaps on my ballot. It’s the thirtieth Oz novel, in the series started long long before by L. Frank Baum, but the first by John R. Neill. It starts with a heroine who herself takes her name from a racist legend of the New Jersey/Pennsylvania border, having an encounter with a leprechaun who is as Oirish as they come. The happy ending of the book – I am not making this up – comes when the Wizard of Oz surgically removes any trace of ambition from the heroine, so that she can be a modest and pleasant girl. There is an election, which is determined by assigning voters to each candidate randomly and adding up their total weight. (Oz experts claim that this bit was not written by Neill. It’s one of the better bits of the book.)
By my count it just struggles across the 40,000 word threshold to count as a novel. But I hope that next year’s Hugo administrators won’t need to make that judgement.