I attended a speech given by US Undersecretary of State Nick Burns on Monday. In the course of his remarks, he described the USA and Russia as having an “open relationship”.

Isn’t that the kind of relationship in which both partners agree that it’s OK to shag other people?

Discuss.

Silly!

You.
Can.
Only.
Type.
One.
Word.

Not as easy as you might think.

1. Where is your cell phone? Here.

2. Describe your boyfriend/girlfriend? Wife.

3. Your hair? Clean.

4. Your mother? Away.

5. Your father? Dead.

6. Your favourite item? Gadgets.

7. Your dream last night? Curtailed.

8. Your favourite drink? Wine.

9. Your dream car? Smooth.

10. The room you are in? Office.

11. Your ex? Lesbian.

12. Your fear? Injustice.

13. What do you want to be in 10 years? Political.

14. Who did you hang out with last night? Wife.

15. What you’re not? Stupid.

19. The last thing you did? Emailed.

20. What are you wearing? Suit.

22. Your favourite book? Genre.

23. The last thing you ate? Greek.

24. Your life? Busy.

25. Your mood? Tired.

26. Your friends? Numerous.

27. What are you thinking about right now? Quiz.

28. Your car? Renault

29. What are you doing at the moment? Typing.

30. Your summer? Resting.

31. Your relationship status? Married.

32. What is on your tv? Nothing.

33. When is the last time you laughed? Today.

34. Last time you cried? Year.

35. School? Rathmore.

1) The UN Special negotiator, ex-president Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, has recommended independence for Kosovo. See his letter to Ban Ki-Moon here and his full recommendations here.

2) Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams have agreed to govern Northern Ireland together, starting in a few weeks’ time. See Slugger O’Toole’s quick links to everyone’s statements here.

I’ve been expecting both of these to happen for some time, and in neither case is the story over yet. But it’s a big day none the less.

14) 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, by James Shapiro

The last book I read about the events of a single year in a single country was a bit of a disappointment. This is not. Shapiro has done a brilliant job of painting a picture of London in 1599, the year that Shakespeare wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and started on Hamlet, going through as many surviving books and documents from that year as possible, mooring his narrative quite firmly in what facts we have, frank about the extent to which he is speculating when he does.

For those who are not London residents (maybe even for those who are) the first interesting page is the very first, with a map of London in 1599. My own business in the city these days tends to be concentrated around Whitehall and Westminster, so there’s a bit of cognitive dissonance at seeing them so far outside the old city limits. And while I knew that the Tower roughly marked one end of the City, I didn’t realise that St Paul’s marked pretty much the other end. Even by Pepys’ day, sixty years later, a lot of the West End had been built over. Shakespeare’s generation must have been the last for whom Lincoln’s Inn Fields really were fields.

To my surprise, Ireland also looms heavily in the story. At school we were taught a bit about the Nine Years’ War of 1594 to 1603, which led to the Flight of the Earls 400 years ago this coming September. (I bet English schoolchildren are not taught about it at all.) But to get it from the English perspective is very interesting.  Here you had a seemingly unending overseas conflict pitting English soldiers against bitter and successful insurgents, to the point that the government as a whole was becoming deeply discredited by its failure to win and the waste of money and soldiers. So, no resonances with the situation of 400 years later at all then.

The book also brought home to me how little I know Shakespeare. I “did” Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet at school, and I guess I have picked up a certain knowledge of a few others by seeing them on stage and screen since (Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, er, that’s it). Also I used to spend tedious amounts of time arguing the authorship question with Oxfordian wingnuts on hlas. Now I want to go out and buy the complete BBC Shakespeare DVD collection. But then I saw the price. Maybe I’ll try and borrow them from the in-laws.

Top UnSuggestion for this book: In Her Shoes, by Jennifer Weiner.

I see that the prime minister of Armenia has died suddenly. I had lunch with him (or rather was in attendance at a lunch with my then boss) in 2004. Not quite as dramatically as his predecessor in 1999, or the prime minister of neighbouring Georgia in 2005, but still rather a shock to the political system. Armenia is one of those oddities, a multi-party system with distinctly authoritarian tendencies. President Kocharian is due to stand down next year, and his hand-picked successor, the current defence minister Sarkisian, is giving a talk in Brussels next week. I think I may go to that, if it is still on.

Via

slovobooks

 comes the news that the BBC shop in Belfast, along with the BBC shops in Norwich, Tunbridge Wells, Kingston-upon-Thames and three in London (but not those in Brighton, Leicester, Birmingham, Eastbourne and Liverpool), is to close by end of next month. Bah.

Bah. I am still mourning New Worlds in London (March 2005) and the ABC bookshop in Leuven (December 2005).

This is another manifestation of the power of the internet, as demonstrated to me a few days ago in Vienna.

The German foreign ministry is sending me lots of exciting emails about the anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. This is indeed significant, but I had a look at Wikipedia for today’s other anniversaries, especially birthdays. Quite a lot of them, mostly famous actors:

• 1347 – St Catherine of Siena
• 1767 – Joachim Murat, King of Naples (d. 1815)
• 1867 – Arturo Toscanini, Italian conductor, (d. 1957)
• 1906 – A.J.P. Taylor, British historian (d. 1990)
• 1911 – Jack Ruby, killer of Lee Harvey Oswald (d. 1967)
• 1920 – Patrick Troughton, British actor (d. 1987)
• 1928 – Jim Lovell, American astronaut
• 1942 – Aretha Franklin, American singer
• 1942 – Richard O’Brien, English actor and writer
• 1947 – Elton John, English singer and songwriter
• 1965 – Sarah Jessica Parker, American actress
• 1974 – Lark Voorhies, American actress

A good reason to commemorate Patrick Troughton, the second Doctor Who. But my mind is slightly boggled by the fact that both Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, and Richard O’Brien, the originator of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, turn 65 today.

12) Living Next Door to the God of Love, by Justina Robson
13) Spin Control, by Chris Moriarty

Read for review elsewhere.

While the grenade attack on Wednesday night did not cause me any personal inconvenience, the same may not be true of last night’s snowfall…
——————

Met up with a friend for dinner last night; he asked if I fancied trying the city’s only Japanese restaurant. Somehow I felt this might be a bad move, and we opted for the Thai restaurant instead. Which was just as well, because during the evening someone threw a hand-grenade at the Japanese restaurant. Nobody injured, and only “minor material damage” reported; but I think I was happy to just have conversation rather than explosion with my meal.

Just looked in on the American Bookstore (or “International Bookstore”, as it has rebranded itself) on the Rechter Wienzeile here in Vienna. On previous visits I’ve found it a very pleasant place to browse, but came away with nothing this time; the SF section seems to be less than half its former size, with chick-lit filling much of the gap.

I asked the man behind the counter (the proprietor, I suppose) if I was right to think they had cut back in that area. He confirmed my suspicions, adding that most SF fans (in Vienna, at least) are now shopping on the internet.

Interesting.
——————

11) Master of Earth and Water, by Diana L. Paxson and Adrienne Martine-Barnes

Cuchulain seems to be a far more popular subject of modern fantasy drawing from the Irish legends than Finn MacCool. In fact, I can’t remember coming across any other version of the latter apart from Lady Gregory, who I must have read over thirty years ago, and I must admit I am hazy on most of the details.

This is a fairly fat novel, dealing entirely with the boyhood deeds of the hero and concluding with the only incident I can remember from the original legend (the cooking of the Salmon of Wisdom). It is a good effort, a Bildungsroman about a character with superhuman powers, and with unusual care taken to avoid anachronism – no Christian-era personal names, no potatoes, not too much wishful thinking about how perfect and emancipated pagan Irish society was. I enjoyed it more than I had expected to.
——————

10) Glorifying Terrorism, ed. Farah Mendlesohn

This is a collection of short stories, mostly sfnal, some by people on my friends list, pulled together in protest at the recent UK legislation banning literature or speech which glorifies terrorism.

An British friend of mine reacted with condescension when this book came up in conversation recently: the view was expressed that it was basically a publicity stunt, with the people behind it seeking a kind of martyrdom for free speech by being prosecuted under the legislation. I think my friend came close to completely missing the point. The fact that such a case is unlikely to be prosecuted says much more about the silliness of the legislation than about any silliness of intent of the editor and authors. The mere existence of the book on the shelves of the bookshop is itself subversive of a bad law, and helps to raise public awareness, and perhaps to make people question their government’s actions more thoroughly. Not that I have struck very hard against the UK legislation myself, in that I bought the book in Dublin and read it in Belgium (and am writing this en route to Austria).

Oh yeah, none of the stories is bad either. Many of them go for standard sfnal riffs of humans occupying alien planets (or vice versa) and the underdog biting back; the most memorable of these for me was “Execution Day”, by Marie Brennan. Some take a different tack; I particularly liked Ken MacLeod’s piece, “MS Found on a Hard Drive”, which assembles various of his musings on the subjects of terrorism and contemporary (or near-future, or recent past) Scottish and Irish politics. (Some of us were fortunate enough to hear Ken reading the first half of it in Dublin at P-Con.) Charles Stross has a neat epilogue as well, suggesting that the Labour Party will come to its senses, but not until long after it is too late. A collection worth looking out for on its own literary merits, quite apart from the political point being made.
——————

My essay on Ian Marter’s Doctor Who novels, slightly edited and expanded, is now up on Strange Horizons.

I have now updated the webpage for each constituency on my site – East Belfast, North Belfast, South Belfast, West Belfast, East Antrim, North Antrim, South Antrim, North Down, South Down, Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Foyle, Lagan Valley, East Londonderry, Mid Ulster, Newry and Armagh, Strangford, West Tyrone, and Upper Bann. And the sun has just come out.

Edited to add: I see that the SDLP are criticising Sinn Fein for – get this – daring to canvass and campaign efficiently. The nerve of them, seeking to maximise their vote in order to win more seats! It’s pretty clear from the election results that the SDLP would never Stoop to such strategic activity!

A somewhat extraordinary blog entry attacking me by name, but completely incorrect about a) my current employers, b) my previous employers’ source of funding and c) my own views on the issue which so exercises him. In his previous entry (which he links to) he accused me of working for the CIA.

Oh well, one can certainly experience worse personal abuse on-line, I suppose.

Edited to add: I see he’s posted it to alt.news.macedonia and soc.culture.irish as well. Fortunately nobody reads usenet any more.

4) Doctor Who – The Massacre, by John Lucarotti
5) Doctor Who – The Ark, by Paul Erickson
6) Doctor Who – The Celestial Toymaker, by Gerry Davis and Alison Bingeman
7) Doctor Who – The Gunfighters, by Donald Cotton
8) Doctor Who – The Savages, by Ian Stuart Black
9) Doctor Who – The War Machines, by Ian Stuart Black

Feeding my unhealthy fascination with the First Doctor’s companion Dodo, I borrowed ‘s copies of the Target novelisations of her stories and found them pretty easy to get through. They are all between 120 and 150 pages long, and not particularly taxing. I read them in sequence, but in fact there is little real sense of continuity between them; fans will find more to tickle their obsessions in the four spinoff novels featuring Dodo, whose collective pagecount certainly exceeds that of the six discussed here.

The novelisation of The Massacre strays furthest from the story as broadcast: we experience it as a flashback from the First Doctor’s point of view, at a moment when he has temporarily made his peace with the Time Lords and is relaxing in the garden from which he is wrenched for The Five Doctors. Rather than the Doctor disappearing from the scene as he does in the TV story, here he and Steven get completely sucked into the Protestants’ attempts to discredit the Doctor’s double, the Abbot of Amboise, and to be honest it is all rather confusing; apparently the story had to be rewritten to allow for Hartnell’s health (or the unusability of Lucarotti’s original script, depending what version you believe). We get the impression that because of the Doctor’s interference to save Anne Chaplet, the Time Lords get grumpy with him again. There is also circumstantial evidence to support the Wood/Miles view of what was going on after curfew, though they are wrong about the chariot pulled by greyhounds (they are Alsatians). Dodo does not appear at all except in that her arrival is referred to by the Time Lords in the epilogue.

Like Lucarotti, Paul Erickson added some extra chrome into the book version of The Ark which was, I suppose, not realisable on screen, notably the numerous different habitats on the Guardian/Monoid spaceships, and a second invisible Refusian. Also the motivation for the Monoids’ peculiar decision to send the Doctor and Dodo on an exploratory mission is (just about) rationalised. I had forgotten just how bloodthirsty the climax is, as the Monoids wipe each other out in a firefight (and here Erickson gives in to Ian Marter-style temptation to make the fighting even more vicious on the page). I felt, however, that the characterisation of the first Doctor was a bit shaky, with a bit too much use of “old chap” which is not really one of his catchphrases. (Sarah Crotzer disagrees on that point.)

Alison Bingeman is currently the story editor for a US/Canadian TV series called Whistler which I have not previously heard of. Apparently she was married to Gerry Davis, who heavily revised Brian Hayles’ original scripts for The Celestial Toymakeragrees.)

Donald Cotton’s novelisation of The Gunfighters is, I think justly, acknowledged as one of the great Target novelisations. It takers the basic theme of the televised story, but messes around immensely with the actual plot and details, especially in the last episode. (Again, Sarah Crotzer has analysed this in detail). As with Doctor Who – The Massacre, the story is told in flashback, but this time it is the dying Doc Holliday recounting events to Ned Buntline. The whole thing is done in a brilliant pastiche of Western idiom, and it is very entertaining. (Though I am in the very small minority in fandom who actually enjoyed the “Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon”, a song linking scenes of the TV version which is of course dropped from the novel.)

The two Ian Stuart Black stories both deal with the misuse of technology by humanity, though in the first case it is humanity which is more in error and in the second it is clearly the machine which is the villain. The novelisation of The Savages sticks pretty closely to the TV script, and there’s little more to say about it than that (and Sarah Crotzer has said it). The Doctor’s most amusing line has been cut for some strange reason.

Black played around a bit more with the plot of The War Machines, and it is generally to the book’s benefit. Whereas in the TV version, the Doctor rather incongruously walks straight into the heart of the British scientific establishment and is accepted immediately, here he engages in a combination of forging letters of introduction and invoking Ian Chesterton, now, we are told, a senior scientist (he must have achieved that pretty quickly in the year since the end of The Chase, but let that pass). Also the War Machines themselves, liberated from the clunky restrictions of television production, come across as distinctly more menacing. One feels that this is what Black really wanted the TV show to be like, especially since for most of it he sticks fairly close to the script (including the Doctor’s closing rant).

In conclusion, I found these books a pretty easy read when feeling generally somewhat run down. They do feed into my thoughts on Dodo as a character, but I will save that for another day.

Thannks to , the Letter To Coroticus.

Am feeling better this morning than I have for the last three. I went to an early St Patrick’s Day reception in Belfast on Tuesday night, and either I overdid the canapés or they overdid me; definite internal discomfort ever since. Presumably the saint was expressing his disapproval of untimely commemoration. Still, a quiet weekend is indicated.

As reminds me.

Yesterday: Quite amusing
Today: Rather amusing!

I know you have all been dying to watch my seminar yesterday about the Northern Ireland elections last week. Apparently it is now online here. I haven’t yet watched it so I have no idea how embarrassing it is (or not). (Edited to add: Needs to be illustrated with the Powerpoint.)

I misjudged the time of driving back down to Dublin airport so missed my flight, and had to get the first one back this morning. However, this did have the unexpected benefit of an evening chez , watching our selection of classic Who episodes: he chose The Ambassadors of Death #1 and The Deadly Assassin #1, I picked The Mind Robber #1 and The Dalek Invasion of Earth #3. I had earlier raided his stash of Target novelisations, for reasons which will become clear in due course.

And eventually caught the early plane this morning without incident, and now going home on the train.
——————

Great fun at P-Con, thanks to all the team for organising it, and good to meet wyvernfriend   (and entourage) at last, as well as catching up with various people (was fortunate enough at dinner on Saturday to be flanked by natural20   and Leah Moore, and opposite mizkit, gaspode_girl and jemck). I was relieved to not be on any panels (or, to be more strictly accurate, to have arrived from Brussels only half way through the second one I was scheduled to be on) because my energy levels were generally low – had done a work trip to a neighbouring country last Thursday, which meant getting up at 5 am for a 9 am meeting.

Have spent yesterday and today driving to Belfast, writing a lecture and then delivering it, which was fun but pretty all-absorbing. I did manage to get hacked into a reception last night at which I bumped into various old friends from my Alliance Party days, including both the current and the former Speakers of the Assembly. Then my lecture was attended by reps from Alliance, the DUP and the Green Party; if there were others there, they did not declare themselves. The whole thing is apparently going to be available as a webcast – will post here when it is online.

And so home this evening; but fortunately I have time for a little bookshopping first.

(Comments screened. I will delete any comment giving the slightest hint as to which country is being talked about.)

The foreign ministry is a peculiar warren of corridors and staircases, basically because it is an eighteenth-century mansion now called upon to be the nerve centre of the modern state’s international activities. I had had a good late morning meeting with A, a diplomat a few years older than me, and he was bringing me as promised to my friend B’s office. Eventually A located the correct staircase to find B, and declared bemusedly that he had not ascended that particular flight of stairs in twenty years. But his instincts were good, and indeed at the top of the stairs we found B in her office.

Which is basically the changing room behind the minstrels’ gallery from which one could serenade the ballroom at the heart of the eighteenth-century mansion that has now become the foreign ministry.

But she has a computer and a desk.

I find this peculiar. But maybe that is just me.

3) Blankets, by Craig Thompson (.co.uk, .com)

One of the top 25 comics as listed by Time magazine. This is a beautifully told coming of age story, featuring first love at long distance, a repressive evangelical Christian background, and the heavy blankets of snow of Wisconsin and Michigan. (I had the first of these, but not really the second and nothing like the third.) It's actually a couple of days since I finished it, but I keep thinking of bits of it nostalgically.

Anyway, I'm glad I tracked this one down.

Top UnSuggestion for this book: Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman.
——————

londonkds

 points out the possible roots of two Buffy episodes in early Third Doctor stories.

(See some of you at P-Con later.)

Sounds like Alliance is not only holding its own, but may gain the elusive seat in South Belfast. Though I haven’t heard from Strangford.

DUP up everywhere, UUP down; similar but smaller swing from SDLP to SF.

Of the smaller parties, Bob McCartney is likely to lose in North Down, and in the other seats he is contesting; but the Greens seem in with a good chance of picking up there, and next door in East Belfast the PUP appear likely to keep David Ervine’s seat.

This is all based on phone conversations with people at the various counts; therefore may be wildly inaccurate!
——————

1) Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite, by Carne Ross (.co.uk, .com)
2) Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower, by John Brady Kiesling (.co.uk, .com)

These two books have a certain amount in common. Both authors resigned from their diplomatic careers (Ross from the British Foreign Office, Kiesling from the US State Department) in protest at the Iraq war. Both books offer a blow-by-blow account of how the respective writers came to their decisions. And both also offer some wider systemic thoughts about what went wrong, allowing grotesque and murderous blunders like Iraq to happen. Neither, interestingly, subscribes to any deeper conspiracy theory about why Iraq happened. Both are pretty scathing about the usefulness of intelligence agencies.

Kiesling was not intimately involved with the Iraq issue. He writes instead of years of getting to know Greece and trying to interpret it to Washington (and vice versa) with excursions also into Armenia, Romania, Morocco and India. His chapter on terrorism – specifically the Greek 17 November group, and how the US security agencies hindered Greek law enforcement from catching them – is a classic, and I’m glad to hear from the author that he’s expanding that topic into another book. Most readers, however, will concentrate on his vivd descriptions of senior colleagues, and will boggle slightly at the occasional blocks of blacked out text, most of which appears to have been about the CIA.

Ross was much closer to the Iraq issue, having been posted to the British mission to the UN where he handled negotiations on sanctions against Baghdad in the years leading up to the war. He writes now of his shame in colluding with the misery of the Iraqi people, but also of much else about diplomacy: the mind-set, the procedural rituals, the peculiar training process, and the systematic failure of international negotiators to listen to the people whose fate is settled around the conference table. He has now founded a new organisation whose goal is precisely to help the marginalised actors in international politics to be heard in the diplomatic world, and in the interests of full disclosure I should state that I work for it, and him.

Kiesling is deeply committed to the idea that US diplomacy still can be a force for good in the world, and his resignation was a protest at the squandering of America’s moral capital, in which he felt he could no longer collude. Ross takes the view that the system itself is broken: traditional diplomacy is caught up with procedure and bureaucracy, and the real stuff is increasingly happening elsewhere. I find myself closer to Ross’s views (which is just as well since I work for him, not Kiesling); in particular, it ties in well with the concept of epistemic communities which I find fascinating.

But I think anyone wanting to understand better what features of the international system made the Iraq war possible will find much of interest in both of these books.
——————

…anyone need a room-mate for P-Con next weekend?

It was cool, wasn’t it? We are an hour later, so didn’t stay up for totality; but it is pretty impressive all the same. We had promised F that we would wake him up to see it if the skies cleared, but he was too soundly asleep to be roused. Oh well, he will have more eclipses in his life.