(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.
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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!
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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.
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…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.

What with jetlag and work commitments I’ve found it difficult to get the energy to update the elections website, but have now done so.

What’s interesting is the relatively high degree of stasis expected by the punters, with no change predicted by the majority for no less than 12 of the 18 constituencies, and a majority also expecting Arlene Foster to keep her seat in Fermanagh and South Tyrone despite defecting from the UUP to the DUP. Also the vast majority expect David Ervine‘s seat in East Belfast to go to the DUP.

The other four constituencies, however, are much more difficult to call. Opinion is almost evenly divided on whether or not the DUP can pick up a seat in East LondonDerry from the UUP. This is very difficult to call, with a DUP defector to the UKUP, in a constituency where an independent Unionist unexpectedly broke through in 1998, adding further complexity.

In South Belfast, the vast majority expect the DUP to pick up a seat from the UUP. But the interesting element is the Alliance Party, expected by a third of the punters to pick up a seat here – but who from? (Most likely SF; then possibly the SDLP; some hopefuls think the UUP).

In South Antrim, the vast majority expect Mitchell McLaughlin to pick up a seat for SF; but again, from whom? Most think Alliance’s David Ford, but the SDLP are also seen as vulnerable by a minority.

Finally, the majority see three seats changing hands in Lagan Valley, with the DUP likely to keep both its defection gains from the UUP and SF also likely to gain a seat, but whether from the SDLP (slightly more likely) or Alliance (slightly less likely) is unclear.

My wishful thinking is, of course, that Alliance keeps both its difficult defences and wins in South Belfast; don’t particularly mind who loses out. This time next week we will know for sure.

As seen in SF Signal:

Novels: The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner is owned by more LibraryThing users than any two other nominees combined.

Novellas: only four??? One of those by Michael Burstein??? And the panel couldn’t bring themselves to add anything else???

Novelettes: again, interesting that the jury couldn’t bring themselves to add anything. Peter S. Beagle has a shot at winning the Hugo/Nebula double, the only one of last year’s Hugo winners to be on the short list (Spin having been pruned from the long list).

Short Stories: haven’t read any of them yet, except helen Remembers the Stork Club, downloaded from FictionWise and read in new York last week (and by coincidence, it is set there). Will report back.

Scripts: Go Doctor Who!

Thanks to and , How to Choose a Wife, a Redemptorist pamphlet from the 1960s.

Thanks to , the latest from Al Gore.

24) Catalyst, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Read for review elsewhere, while awake in the middle if the night due to jetlag.

“This book failed to cure my jetlag” – admittedly not a rousing recommendation!

My culinary influence spreads.

My new intern started today. She spotted my Valentine’s day present, and informed me that her brother was a friend of Terry Nation’s son, and she had spent many happy childhood hours trundling along inside the original daleks.

If she’d put that on her CV, I’d have hired her immediately without going through all this interviewing nonsense!

…to the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. May they enjoy it some day soon.

The Hungarian state airline MALEV has just been sold to the Russians for 200 million forint. At today’s exchange rates, that is £530,000, $1.05 million (US), or just under €800,000.

Compare with the value of your house, and ask yourself if you should be saving up for your own airline instead. And ths is not the first time – indeed, MALEV is rather expensive by eastern European standards; back in 1999 an Israeli investor bought the Bulgarian national carrier, Balkan Air, for only $150,000, though that deal rapidly turned out to be just as dodgy as you would expect.

A few days ago I asked what the next pair of numbers in this series is:

49, 1
50, 10
53½, 21½
55, 25
60½, 35½
62, 38

has posted the correct answer:
70,50

The diference between the squares of each pair of numbers is 2400:
49² – 1² = 2401 – 1 = 2400 (48*50)
50² – 10² = 2500 – 100 = 2400 (40*60)
53½² – 21½² = 2862¼ – 462¼ = 2400 (32*75)
55² – 25² = 3025 – 625 = 2400 (30*80)
60½² – 35½² = 3660¼ – 1260¼ = 2400 (25*96)
62² – 38² = 3844 – 1444 = 2400 (24*100)
70² – 50² = 4900 – 2500 = 2400 (20*60120)

And so on up to 1200½² – 1199½² = 1441200¼ – 1438800¼ = 2400 (1*2400).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ_mlwnAmr0

I especially love the use of Beethoven’s 7th.

22) William Howard Taft: A Conservative’s Conception of the Presidency, by Donald F. Anderson (.co.uk, .com)
23) 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs – the Election That Changed the Country, by James Chace (.co.uk, .com)

The last president whose biography I read was John Adams, who shares with Taft the distinction of running for re-election and coming third, which is difficult in a two-party system. (In Adams’ case, of course, the voting system was different, and he really came second behind the Jefferson/Burr ticket.) Neither Adams nor Taft had an especially distinguished presidency, but sometimes failure can have more lessons than success.

Taft did not especially want to be President anyway. It is striking that of the many photographs of him in these two books, the one in which he looks happiest – indeed, is beaming joyfully – was taken on 4 March 1913 as he handed over the White House to Woodrow Wilson. Hand-picked by Theodore Roosevelt as his successor, he lacked the basic political skills to survive – his only previous elected office was a judicial post in his native Ohio, and his experience of executive government, running America’s newly acquired Philippines colony, gave him no taste of dealing with other political leaders.

Once Roosevelt had lost patience with Taft, he contested the Republican nomination for the 1912 election and was basically cheated out of it by Taft’s supporters. He then broke from his own party and ran on a far more left-wing ticket than any major candidate before or since. Taft was crushed in the election and won only two states, Utah and Vermont. The Republican party, which had won eleven of the previous thirteen presidential elections, won only three of the next ten.

Anderson’s book (published in 1968) is a decent enough dissection of Taft’s character and mistakes, but I had hoped for a bit more of a human dimension. Chace’s book, published just after his own death in 2004, has loads of human interest – it starts with Taft weeping at Roosevelt’s graveside in 1919 – and I particularly learnt from it about the Socialist leader Eugene Debs, but it was curiously unfocussed, and poorly edited in places.

Both books, however agreed on the two incidents in Taft’s presidency which particularly drove Roosevelt to feel that his legacy had been betrayed: the first being a public row between Taft’s Secretary of the Interior and the head of the Forestry Service who had been appointed by Roosevelt; and the second a move to reverse an industrial merger which had been approved several years earlier by Roosevelt. Crucial in advising Taft badly in the first case, and actually taking the steps which so offended Roosevelt in the second, was Taft’s attorney-general, George W. Wickersham, a New York corporate lawyer memorably described as having the political sensitivity of an ox. His younger sister was my great-grandmother.

21) Recursion, by Tony Ballantyne (.co.uk, .com)

Read for review elsewhere. The review will not be ecstatic.

20) Spin State, by Chris Moriarty (.co.uk, .com)

This had been on my shelf for a couple of years, and I finally picked it up because the sequel is on my current reading list. I wish I’d got to it sooner. This is a very tightly woven and tightly written tale of artificial intelligence, activist miners, murder and identity. Catherine Li, sent unwillingly to her home planet to investigate the mysterious death of a famous scientist, is a memorable heroine. Also features embittered Irish militants, mourning the fact that their native land is now covered in glaciers. Recommended.

Top UnSuggestions for this book:

1. The devil wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger
2. The perks of being a wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
3. The good earth by Pearl S. Buck
4. The secret life of bees by Sue Monk Kidd
5. The bean trees : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver

This plane was supposed to have taken off 45 minutes ago, but the snow is now drifting down heavily over New York and the captain has just told us it may be another hour and a half at least before we take off. Oh well, I have plenty to read and had written tomorrow off for jet-lag anyway.

One of my fellow speakers from the conference shared a car with me to Portland airport but by the time we got there it was already clear that his flight home to Washington would be cancelled. We worked out that if he could be driven on to Boston he would have a pretty good chance of catching the train home. I hope he made it.
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I haven’t had Internet access since Friday morning, my longest period of being “unwired” for years (am posting this from my Blackberry, so not even sure if I will be properly online before I get home on Monday morning).

Anyway, it’s been a pleasant little conference, in the town just next to the other Belfast. I’m sorry not to have visited the town named after my birthplace, but you can’t have everything.

Most conferences I attend are organised by institutions which are themselves engaged in the issues; this one appears to be entirely staffed by local citizens, wanting to contribute to the cultural life of their community. They have flown me and a bunch of other experts way up to the frozen north, far from my usual haunts in this country. The speakers have almost all been of top quality, and the organisers very hospitable (I was billeted with a very nice Quaker couple).

Snow is still piled high here, in the front yards of the pretty wooden houses, with Penobscot Bay gleaming in the low winter sunlight. Intellectually demanding, but physically relaxing. Now it’s time to go home; leave Camden at 1130; home about 1000 tomorrow, so that’s sixteen hours of travel.

There is at the back of my mind some idea that Rockport, Maine, has an sfnal connection – some well-known writer associated with it, perhaps. Any ideas who I might be thinking of?
——————

What pair of numbers is next in this list?

49, 1
50, 10
53½, 21½
55, 25
60½, 35½
62, 38
——————

19) The Iraq Study Group Report (.co.uk, .com)

When I dropped in on my old friend Dan Serwer in his office at USIP the other day, he proudly thrust the famous Baker/Hamilton report at me, gloating that over 2 million copies of it had been downloaded. It was only when I looked inside this morning that I realised Dan himself had been the Iraq Study Group’s executive director.

For a main text of less than a hundred pages, aimed exclusively at policy-makers concerned with the question of What Next?, it is not bad – especially the recommendations on better US diplomacy in the region, ie Iran and Syria, and the Israel/Palestine dispute. Shame that doesn’t appear to be happening.

I missed, though, any serious analysis of how the greatest military machine the world has ever known, run by the most powerful democratic state in history, had managed to get itself in this fix in the first place. So it feels very incomplete.

18) Carnival, by Elizabeth Bear (.co.uk, .com)

Read for review elsewhere. Made an interesting paired reading with the Tiptree biography.

17) James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips (.co.uk, .com)

This is surely a model of how to write a biography. Although her subject died in 1987, Julie Phillips has been through all her private papers, done the necessary bureaucratic sleuthing through her career, dug into her parents’ background, interviewed the elderly first husband and many other relatives and friends, reflected on the wider social and literary currents of the time illustrated by the main narrative, and supported it all with extensive notes.

But that’s not enough to make a successful biography. To do that you have to not only know your subject; you have to have chosen someone who is in some way fascinating in their own right, and be able to communicate that fascination to your readers. Phillips has done that admirably. I haven’t read a lot of Tiptree’s work (having said which, there isn’t so very much to read), but I think you could safely give this book to someone who had never heard of her, even someone who never reads science fiction, and sill expect them to enjoy it.

Most readers, however, will have bought this book largely to find out more about Tiptree/Sheldon’s writing; we don’t get anything about that until halfway through, but I don’t think anyone will be bored by the first fifty years of Sheldon’s life – privileged Chicago upbringing, childhood safaris to Africa, a Christmas elopement and disastrous first marriage, World War II and the CIA, psychological research, a better choice of second husband.

And then the decade of fame as SF writer James Tiptree, Jr, producing strange, memorable stories, winning Hugos and Nebulas for them, engaging in intimate correspondence with the luminaries of the genre, but all under a pseudonym which was eventually exposed. I had not realised, however, that the Hugo and nebula for “Houston, Houston, Do You Read” both came after the revelation of her true identity.

The one weak point in Phillips’ analysis has been well illuminated by Farah Mendlesohn: she doesn’t convincingly explain Sheldon’s attitude to sexuality – in fairness, a complex question, and one to which we will probably never know the real answer (although Farah’s answer is more convincing than Phillips’).

I am in a rush this morning in Georgetown, just a few miles from where Alice Sheldon and James Tiptree lived and died, so don’t have time to write more about this brilliant book. But we are promised that the paperback will include more photographs, and more of Sheldon’s own art, so I may find myself buying it all over again.

(Also, it has been interesting to read this alongside Elizabeth Bear’s Carnival over the last few days.)

Top UnSuggestions for this book:

1. Confessions of a shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella
2. Pet sematary by Stephen King
3. Angels & demons by Dan Brown
4. MLA handbook for writers of research papers by Joseph Gibaldi
5. The runaway jury by John Grisham

(This is essentially a test to see if I can post using my Blackberry)

In the middle of reading the Julie Phillips biography of Tiptree/Sheldon, so it seemed strangely appropriate to land at Washington National (“Ronald Reagan”) airport this morning, not so far from where she lived and died.

On previous trips I’ve tended to stay downtown, but this time I’m in Georgetown (just around the corner from Barnes & Noble) and on the way in I felt I was seeing the cityscape from a different perspective; the cathedral on the hill particularly striking, but also the tension between the Lincoln Memorial on one side of the river, turning its back almost on Arlington House across the water.

Anyway. By peculiar coincidence is at a conference nearby, but it doesn’t look like our schedules will mesh.
——————

Nice to meet up with various local bloggers last night – thanks to for facilitating.

Now I need to add , and to my feeds…

16) 100%, by Paul Pope (.co.uk, .com)

Again, a fruit of this discussion from last week, and the only one I spotted in Forbidden Planet in New York. was impressed by this, and so am I. It’s a very well done story of six people, forming and unforming as couples, in the city where I am typing this but in the year 2038; the background is fairly incidental, and it reminded me a bit of Jason Lutes’ Berlin, though with less politics. criticised the artwork, but I thought it was fine.

Hat tip to John Scalzi.

Of course, it’s historically inaccurate – the shift from scroll to codex was a few centuries earlier and a couple of thousand km southeast of this little scene. But it’s funny, so who cares.